The BRICKS desktop: a powerful GUI for the digital librarian

The BRICKS-Desktop is a GUI allowing the digital librarian to interact with the Digital Library Management System (DLMS) BRICKS, which has been developed in the context of the FP6 European Project "Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services". Small cultural heritage institutions requiring to implement, publish and manage their databases face many problems, of a technical and an economical nature. While the BRICKS DLMS provides services to share information in an easy and inexpensive way, the BRICKS-Desktop copes with user interaction and information visualization, offering an easy to use DL GUI Subsystem. The BRICKS-Desktop allows to browse the DL collections of digital objects, manage such collections, import/export digital objects, and perform cross-language search, documents visualization, and so on. The BRICKS-Desktop offers a twofold benefit: a) it supplies a ready to use GUI for expert users of DLs, and b) it allows to build more complex and user oriented GUIs for specific DL tasks, supplying the building blocks (as plug-ins) that hide the interaction with the DLMS. The user interface of the BRICKS-Desktop is built following the desktop GUI paradigm; the implementation of facilities like drag and drop hides to users the distributed nature of the underlying digital objects repository. The Bricks Desktop is based on OSGi technology, its functionalities are implemented as services deployed by specific bundles; functionalities can be then added or removed simply by manipulating bundles.