

While collaboration between universities and schools is desirable, historically, professors and university faculty needed to travel to the schools in order to interact with the students and their teachers. The Internet is a medium that can assist location-independent collaboration among five groups within the US educational system: libraries, university faculty, professors, school teachers, and students. Electronic collaboration gives libraries the ability to recruit, train, and retain quality staff along with the abilty to exploit and promote the use of information seeking skills. Librarians benefit from electronic collborating workspace because it maximizes the libraries knowledge base which increase patron satifaction. The Benefits of Virtual Library Collaboration Since much of their product designs are created off site, many corporations are turning to collaborative design software, which can virtually connect geographically dispersed designers.When corporations outsource things they have less and less control, what corporations are trying to do is use technology in order to reduce that time and distance." The ever changing international business world has many corporations outsourcing manufacturing. The sooner corporations can figure out when to scrap something, the cheaper it is. Linking people by the way of a virtual workspace can decrease problems downstream in the product life cycle. Corporations need to allow their suppliers and manufacturers the ability to collaborate within your applications and improve the creative process. The traditional approach can be compared to designing in a box. Internal communications help the people who are developing products however, they do not really know how their design changes were going to affect their suppliers. Many corporations have used e-mail, phone, or fax to collaborate internally, which limits their communications with suppliers in order to negotiate prices. Virtual Workspace will save Corporations moneyĮlectronic collaborating workspace creates a virtual workspace bringing together all the design contributors, which has several advantages over the traditional approaches. The collaborative workspace interface is developed using the Collaborative Workspace Framework, a toolkit based on the Microsoft Vista technology for the development of robust horizontal interfaces. Every document is contained into a Rotate able Window that implements the basic functionalities for sharing virtual objects into a horizontal stage in a collaborative context. The system design was based on a paper-based metaphor, resulting in a top-projected space where virtual sheets of paper can be created, edited, rotated and shared by the participants.

The Collaborative Workspace supports synchronous cooperation and participation by providing a shared informational space and coordination tools as resources to manage teamwork in a collaborative way. Program sharing has also become available to allow remote users to share much more detailed information through CAD packages, spreadsheets, etc.

These include video and voice messaging services including shared whiteboard capabilities. The popularity of synchronous forms has developed over recent years with the increase in processing capabilities and the widespread availablilty of high speed internet providers. Asynchronous communication includes email, and shared file systems where information is based back and forth in a non-interative, sequential manner. These are typically enabled by a shared mental model, common information, and a shared understanding by all of the participants regardless of physical location.Ĭommunication comes in two forms: synchronous and asynchronous. The environment may be supported by electronic communications and groupware which enable participants to overcome space and time differentials. Working together is faster and easier with a collaborative workspaceĪ collaborative workspace or shared workspace is an inter-connected environment in which all the participants in dispersed locations can access and interact with each other just as inside a single entity.
