Experiences of user involvement in the construction of a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities

This paper reports on some of the experiences of user involvement and requirements capture for the project to build a virtual research environment to serve the humanities division at the University of Oxford. Users have been placed at the centre through two separate phases of the development, analysing the needs of this broad user base, and building a pilot system to support the work of one specialised group of users involved in the reading of ancient documents.