DEBORA Project Description

The objective of our involvement with the DEBORA project is to develop a means of electronic access to a set of digitised printed works. This digitised document collection consists of a number of 16^th century books, that due to the need for conservation are only available for consultation to a small number of experts. The DEBORA (Digital accEss to BOoks of the RenAissance) project aims to bring these important documents to a wider audience.

Here at Lancaster we are involved in the specification and production of a demonstration application to facilitate electronic access to these rare documents. Therefore our basic aim in this project is to make the documents as accessible as possible using electronic distribution media over the Internet. Previously, without electronic intervention, such a scenario would be impossible to achieve due to the fragile nature of the documents, and the inconvenience of travel to the libraries where these documents are stored. Because of the nature of the source documents the digitisation process itself also presents many problems. These will be examined by our project partners.

Digital libraries should have all the services of traditional libraries as well as exploiting the advantages of electronic technology. To enhance the users' experience of the digital library, the client access application will contain a number of CSCW features integrated in the software. These will be incorporated into the tool with the basic aim of simplifying the user's work processes involved in accessing digital libraries. We therefore aim to prototype some novel interaction functionality within the developed tool designed to enhance the experience of reading such documents on-line. We also note that the addition of functionality leads to an overhead on the usability of the software. We therefore intend to apply a rapid prototyping based software process to the client's development. This will help to ensure that we achieve a balance between functionality and ease of use.