The New York Public Library Digital Gallery: An Open Source Approach Using XML and the Lucene Search Engine API John Parsons Technical Project Manager New York Public Library David Dodson Web Developer New York Public Library The New York Public Library's Digital Library Program is nearing the end of a long-term initiative to digitize and index hundreds of thousands of images from the Research Libraries' holdings. Providing access to these images and allowing the public to search and retrieve them in a fast and easy manner has been a technological challenge. After exploring several different approaches, we came up with a low-cost architecture using XML representations of our image data indexed and searched using Lucene, an open source search engine API supported by the Apache Jakarta Project. This briefing will examine the details of the architecture and elaborate on some of the benefits and problems that come along with it.   http://digital.nypl.org/ (program homepage) http://digital.gallery.nypl.org/digital_gallery/