1.1 Name and idea

Just as the Agora was a place of gathering in ancient Greece, a place where public life took place, market was held, where information, opinions and experiences were exchanged, Agora – as a product of the company Satz-Rechen-Zentrum (SRZ) – hopes to be a medium that represents communication exchange within the possibilities of the 21st century..

Nowadays, the real market has been replaced in many areas by the virtual market, the internet. Real business is already being transacted on this virtual market via E-Business.

Agora is a system that allows its users to use the virtual place of gathering in order to present and distribute their own electronic documents. The important factor here is that Agora can process any structured documents and manage all document types. Various collections such as collections of books, photos/videos and magazines can be prepared within an application. With Agora, a complete workflow can be mapped, from ‚raw’ digitisation, to the image processing and structured preparation of metadata and full texts, up to web presentations. Several tools and programme components ensure these processes, which, together, result in a complete solution.

The impetus for the development of Agora arose from our long-time experience with services in the field of ‚creating and structuring text and facsimile data’. Here, SRZ could exhibit a wide base of experience and alot of know-how. An initiative of the German Research Foundation (DFG) with the aim of creating a solution for a distributed digital research library (VDF), it was taken up by SRZ and the Goettingen State and University Library (NSUB). A development partnership was founded and the Agora System version 1.0 for the presentation of content within the framework of the digital library was the result.