The Challenges of Using an Existing Cross-Device Interaction Prototype for Supporting Actual Curation Practices

Volunteer-driven organisations curating historic documents, such as societies and charities, often work within a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) practice and their meetings are in varying situations. A recurring challenge is finding lightweight ways to enable them to share and collectively work with documents using their own devices while in situ. We are working on building novel interaction techniques and applications (prototyped with a custom developer toolkit) for supporting the curation of digital collections – for example, historic documents. We discuss the pros and cons of using an existing prototype system for this purpose and points to consider when taking a prototype from the lab into the wild