Issues to be Addressed for Transforming a Digital Library Application for Experts into One for Final Users

This paper reports on the effort we made in adapting and opening a specialist tool, focused on illumination and designed purposely for scholars and researchers, in order to be suitable also for the general public. We describe the ongoing process we are conducting: the adaptation and the improvement of the IPSA digital archive using the results we collected after several sessions of user interviews, following suggestions of both scholars and simple users. We discuss user studies dynamics, that we consider as a loop-interaction, and the consequences that they entail upon the system design.Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Via Gradenigo 6/a, 35131 Padua, Italy, Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Padua, Piazza Capitaniato 7, 35139 Padua, Italy

Methods of personalising a collection of images using linking annotations

This paper reports the results of an ongoing project that deals with the development of a digital archive of drawings and illustrations of historic documents for research purposes, but also as a tool that can be used to disclose cultural heritage contents to the general public. The digital archive is currently used as a case study to provide innovative tools for researchers and scholars active in the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. In particular, we investigate the use of linking annotations to express the relations between images. We represent annotations with a hypergraph structure and we exploit this information to personalize the way images are presented to the final users