H. Lohninger, Institute for Analytical Chemistry, Vienna University of Technology Coimbra A Development System for Electronic Textbooks

Coimbra is a development system for electronic textbooks. Several electronic textbooks with interactive simulations have been developed on the basis of Coimbra. The most prominent one probably being "H. Lohninger: Teach/Me Data Analysis, Springer, Berlin-New York-Tokyo 1999" which has received a major award just recently ("Deutscher Bildungssoftwarepreis digita 2001" - German Award for Educational Software digita 2001).

The basic idea behind Coimbra is to catalogue data of almost any given format in a database, and organize and prepare the materials for electronic publication. Using Coimbra, it only takes few mouse clicks to create a CD-ROM based as well as a network based version of your database of teaching material. In addition, the freely available Coimbra Viewer offers features which are not available for browser-based systems. Coimbra includes, for example, a full text indexing engine, a course editor, and an elaborate user interface for the administration of materials. In Coimbra it is also guaranteed that the data imported into the database is not altered in any way, so that you can export the documents from the database in their original form. Furthermore, Coimbra encrypts the material in order to prevent unauthorized access to it.
 

The Coimbra viewer is freely available and can be downloaded from this site; a free evaluation copy of the development system Coimbra/Admin is also available from here. More information on Coimbra and on creating electronic textbooks in general can be obtained either from the ebooks Web site or from www.coimbra.at

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