Lightweight realistic books: The Greenstone connection

Abstract

Realistic physically-based computer models of page-turning have been around for years, but are rarely deployed in practice except as eye-catching demos. This demo shows a connection from the Greenstone digital library system to a lightweight Macromedia Flash-based page turning mechanism that allows books in certain styles of collection to be automatically presented using animated page-turning. The system is reactive: it opens books quicker than Adobe Acrobat does and responds instantly to the user’s mouse gestures. It capitalizes on a particular style of structural metadata shared by many Greenstone collections, and uses metadata to enhance browsing the library’s contents.