ReadUp: A Widget for Reading

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.