The University of Aveiro is currently developing SInBAD, an integrated system for digital libraries and archives. The aim of the project is to build an information system to support the aggregation of multimedia documents such as books, photographs, and audiovisual resources. All these resources are part of the academic life and identity of the University.The architecture adopted in SInBAD is divided into 3 subsystems -Library, Archive and Jazz -and is Web Service oriented. Also, documents are distributed by several Agents in a dynamic manner. The basic description model used in the documents is the element set defined by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, although each subsystem may use specific data structures according to the document type and format.In this paper we present the created system, pointing out the interoperability and the web service oriented architecture. Also, despite its distributed nature, users may search simultaneously in all documents.

Annotation tools allow users to complement existing documents with comments, suggestions or other information. Currently, desktop annotation tools are much more sophisticated than those available for annotating web documents. EspiritUs is a Web Services based system designed to allow users to create, share, and search annotations on the web. In this article we analyze in detail existing web annotation tools, present the adopted architecture based on XML technologies, describe the system implementation and present two possible annotation scenarios. Finally, we present some conclusions and guidelines for future work for this project.