ARION is aiming to provide a new generation of Digital Library services for the searching and retrieval of digital scientific collections that reside within research and consultancy organizations. ARION advances the findings of previous studies in this area and consolidates the work of international interoperability standard development to provide a system that is complementary to established scientific practices in these organizations. ARION will be a federated open system and will be developed in association with national data providers, scientific researchers and SMEs.