Performing Arts Data Service - An Online Digital Resource Library

The Performing Arts Data Service (PADS) aims to support research and teaching in UK Higher Education by collecting and promoting the use of digital data relating to the performing arts: music, film, broadcast arts, theatre, dance. The PADS is one of 5 service providers of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) which will provide a single gateway for arts and humanities scholars wishing to search for datasets across various discipline areas. Data is indexed with Dublin Core metadata, will interoperate with other databases within the AHDS and beyond using Z39.50, and will be available via the Web. The diversity of data with which the PADS must deal is a major issue, and any information system for such a service must support text based, visual/image, time-based and complex data, and offer appropriate access over wide area networks. This paper focuses on the system requirements of such a system and briefly describes one implementation of those requirements.