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ACE | Future

ACE Future Development

The ACE prototype demonstrates just a small core slice of the functionality that could be offered to meet the needs of our audience. There are many areas where ACE could be built out or enhanced. Expanding the roster of search tools, and providing more advanced search capabilities would be a primary development goal.

Further development should also encompass the aspects labeled "important", "desirable", or "nice" on our requirements list. One major suite of features would support one-way sharing or collaborative use of project folders. The critical components in sharing and collaboration would include adding group management functionality; supporting permissions; and enabling concurrency and versioning support.

Another rich feature set surrounds import, export and rendering capabilities. Importing items from a local filesystem (including interaction with a repository), exporting selected groups of items, and viewing items or lists of items in formats other than text would provide users with a more integrated experience. Adding an optional bookmarking tool to allow users to easily add link while browsing the Web outside of the ACE environment would also be a significant enhancement.

We see immense value in building out the ability to interact with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative's What, Where, When and Who project, and with the California Digital Library. Further development could incorporate ECAI's tools that provide an interface for enhanced search and viewing of timeline data, geographic location data, and data associating events, locations, and people. Another interesting avenue for exploration with the California Digital Library is to consider the possibility of capturing user-generated groupings of items to underpin recommending and other services for library patrons.

Most of all, we would like to focus much more attention on the user interface, using iterative design based on user testing and user feedback. This effort will be particularly important as the roster of features and supported search tools increases.