Real-time collaboration through visual search and voice-over-IP

Numerous digital libraries (DLs), electronic archives (EAs) and portal services have been developed. These services allow online structured access to digitised information, facilitating remote access for educators and students. Often, DL users and information are remotely located - so too are their users. The authors can envision numerous circumstances where two remotely located parties may wish to opportunistically examine an online resource - e-learning environments for example. We are particularly interested in assisting users whose collaboration resolves around discussion of a common visual resource (documents and collections of documents in the case under discussion). By providing a single tool for information seeking and multi-user collaboration, we believe that the amount of preparation required for an online session is reduced, while the flexibility allowed to parties to conduct ad-hoc examinations of a resource is increased. This paper proposes a framework to address this functionality deficit by describing a document foraging tool that provides facilities for both visual exploration of a document set and Voice-over-IP (VoIP) based collaborative features.