At the Emory Libraries, we're considering a project to develop an interface to improve the usability for our Yellowbacks collections. We would like to have an environment where scholars could do many different things: full-text searching, text analysis, multi-page comparison, annotations (that you can keep private or share), and more. Essentially, we're trying to let people do what they normally would to books, but with the books that aren't readily accessible or are in special collections
Of course, we don't want to only build something that would be useful for one small collection. The interface we're envisioning would be something that could be used with much of our digital collections as well as the collections of other schools. But we're also aware that we're probably not the first to have this idea. We're currently conducting an environmental scan to make sure we can actually contribute something new or to identify those with whom we can collaborate.
So, with that in mind, can you please tell me what interfaces already exist for working on scholarly resources housed in libraries?
