Raymond L. Plante, Daniel Goscha, Richard M. Crutcher
NCSA/U of I
We review our experience, including some lessons learned, using JAVA to create data browsing tools for use with the Astronomy Digital Image Library (ADIL) and related digital library projects at NCSA. We give an overview of our Image Data Browser, a generalized tool under development through a collaboration with the NCSA/NASA Project Horizon in support of access to earth and space science data. Emphasis has been placed on a design that can support a variety of data formats and applications both within and outside of astronomy. ADIL will use this tool in a variety of guises to browse and download images from the Library's collection. We see such a tool filling an important niche as a pipeline from a data repository to specialized, native data analysis software (e.g. IRAF, AIPS).