In search of simplicity: Redesigning the digital bleek and lloyd

The Digital Bleek and Lloyd is a collection of digitised historical artefacts on the Bushman people of Southern Africa. The underlying software was initially designed to enable access from as many people as possible so usage requirements were minimal – it was not even necessary to use a web server or database. However, the system was not focused on preservation, extensibility, or reusability. In this article, it is argued that such desirable attributes could manifest themselves in a natural evolution of the Bleek and Lloyd software system in the direction of greater simplicity. A case study demonstrates that this is indeed feasible in the case of the Digital Bleek and Lloyd and potentially more generally applicable in digital libraries.