We examine one possible future for the library of a professional knowledge worker by examining the UpLib personal digital library system. The system consists of a full-text indexed repository accessed through an active agent via a Web interface. It is suitable for personal collections comprising tens of thousands of documents (including papers, books, photos, receipts, email, etc.), and provides for ease of document entry and access as well as high levels of security and privacy. Unlike many other systems of the sort, user access to the document collection is assured even if the UpLib system is unavailable. It is 'universal' in the sense that documents are canonically represented as projections into the text and image domains, and uses a predominantly visual user interface based on page images. UpLib can thus handle any document format which can be rendered as pages. Provision is made for alternative representations existing alongside the text-domain and image-domain representation, either stored or generated on demand. The system is highly extensible through user scripting, and is intended to be used as a platform for further work in document engineering.

Any new system must provide significant advantages to users for them to adopt it over their existing practices. In this paper, we discuss changes made over the last two years of use of the UpLib personal digital library system, to provide those advantages in the realm of document management. These changes are concentrated in the document acquisition phase, where document analysis is performed and databases of document information are prepared. However, some changes have been made in the areas of document management and document usage, primarily to allow user better interaction with the improved document projections.

User interfaces for digital library systems must support a wide range of user activities. They include search, browsing, and curation, but perhaps the most important is actual reading of the items in the library. Support for reading, however, is usually relegated to applications which are only loosely integrated with the digital library system. One reason for this is the absence of toolkit widget support for the activity of reading. Most user interface toolkits instead provide support for either text editing or text presentation. This makes it difficult to write applications which support reading well. In this paper we describe the origins, design, and implementation of a new Java Swing toolkit widget called ReadUp, which provides support for reading page images in a digital library application, and discuss briefly how it is being used.

A digital library system must support a sweep of document activities for its users, including acquisition, organization, retrieval, and actual reading. In this paper, we discuss how these activities are supported at the base levels of the UpLib personal digital library system. We report on two new features of UpLib which augment previous capabilities. The UpLib Portal is a tool for document acquisition and subsequent retrieval. The ReadUp document reader is a component specifically designed to support reading with annotation and search.

An advanced visual interface system is presented for fluid interaction in a personal digital library system. The system employs a zoomable planar representation of a collection using hybrid continuous/quantum treemap visualizations to facilitate navigation while minimizing cognitive load. By providing both fluidity and a means of reading documents within the same visualization, the system obliterates the traditional boundary separating the acquisition of materials from their use. In addition, the system provides a means of streamlining and largely automating the addition of new documents into a collection. The system is particularly well suited to user tasks which, in the physical world, are normally carried out by laying out a set of related documents on a physical desk — namely, those tasks that require frequent and rapid transfer of attention from one document in the collection to another. Discussed are the design and implementation of the system as well as its relationship to previous work.

An advanced visual interface system is presented for fluid interaction in a personal digital library system. The system employs a zoomable planar representation of a collection using hybrid continuous/quantum treemap visualizations to facilitate navigation while minimizing cognitive load. By providing both fluidity and a means of reading documents within the same visualization, the system obliterates the traditional boundary separating the acquisition of materials from their use. In addition, the system provides a means of streamlining and largely automating the addition of new documents into a collection. The system is particularly well suited to user tasks which, in the physical world, are normally carried out by laying out a set of related documents on a physical desk - namely, those tasks that require frequent and rapid transfer of attention from one document in the collection to another. Discussed are the design and implementation of the system as well as its relationship to previous work.

Digital libraries are increasingly based on digital page images of documents, but techniques for constructing usable versions of these page images are still largely folklore. This paper documents some issues encountered in creating document icons, page thumbnails, and page images for the UpLib digital library system, and suggests answers for each of them, based on both problem analysis and user feedback. In particular, several algorithms for determining useful sizes of both document icons and large page images are discussed.

The UpLib personal digital library system is specifically designed for secure use by a single individual, instead of collaborative use by a number of people. However, collaborative operation of multiple UpLib repositories is still possible. This paper describes two mechanisms that have been added to UpLib to facilitate community building around individual document collections.

We describe the design and use of a personal digital library system, UpLib. The system consists of a full-text indexed repository accessed through an active agent via a Web interface. It is suitable for personal collections comprising tens of thousands of documents (including papers, books, photos, receipts, email, etc.), and provides for ease of document entry and access as well as high levels of security and privacy. Unlike many other systems of the sort, user access to the document collection is assured even if the UpLib system is unavailable. It is ``universal'' in the sense that documents are canonically represented as projections into the text and image domains, and uses a predominantly visual user interface based on page images. UpLib can thus handle any document format which can be rendered as pages. Provision is made for alternative representations existing alongside the text-domain and image-domain representation, either stored or generated on demand. The system is highly extensible through user scripting, and is intended to be used as a platform for further work in document engineering. UpLib is assembled largely from open-source components (the current exception being the OCR engine, which is proprietary).

We trace through the initial design and early evolution of a personal digital library system pieced together largely from open-source components (the current exception being the OCR engine, which is proprietary). The system consists of a repository, a search engine, and a Web interface. It is suitable for personal collections comprising tens of thousands of documents (including papers, books, photos, receipts, etc.), and provides for ease of document entry and access as well as basic security and privacy. Representation of documents in an image-domain format is taken as canonical, exploiting the fact that documents are ultimately presented as visual objects to a user to achieve some degree of ``universality.'' Provision is made for alternative representations existing alongside the image-domain representation, either stored or generated on demand. At the conference we will demo the document-access portion of the system implemented self-contained on an ultra-portable laptop holding about 2,000 documents including many scanned books.