Rese aRch Fe aTURe

A digital library project aims to combine the look and feel of physical books with the advantages of online documents such as hyperlinks and multimedia. A lightweight open source implementation enables highly responsive page turning and works within standard Web browsers. P eople like books. They’re convenient and can be accessed easily and enjoyably. Their physical characteristics—their size, heft, and condition, along with the patina of page use—communicate ambient qualities of the document they represent. In contrast, many view the experience of accessing and exploring online documents as dull and utilitarian; the appeal is to technophiles, not bibliophiles. But people also like electronic documents. They provide great added value over ink spots on paper: searching, hyperlink-ing, animation, multimedia. Can the advantages of both media be combined in a way that is suitable for wide-spread use? The New Zealand Digital Library Project (www.nzdl. org) is experimenting with lightweight implementa-tions of realistic electronic books with quick and highly responsive page-turning mechanisms that are usable within today’s Web browsers. The approach sacrifices some 3D realism to achieve immediate interactivity with current technology. Nevertheless, the result is appeal-ing and has many advantages over viewing documents as standard HTML or PDF files, as confirmed by a user evaluation