Using advanced communications and multimedia applications to provide real life benefits to remote rural areas: BARBARA

SUMMARY The Barbara Project is an exciting project which is designing and implementing interactive, multimedia technology to improve the quality of-council and other services delivered to rural communities. The rural communities involved in the project are in: Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Germany. The full range of multimedia will be used to support the service, such as simultaneous: voice, video, data (text and image). The main emphasis of the project is in user-involvement from an early stage, so that technology is not foisted upon rural communities and so the whole project is user-led rather than technology-led. To enable this to happen a continuous process of consultation and review has been instigated to allow for the participant communities to be involved in deciding what services are to be delivered and in which ways the service will be presented on the unit. This paper describes the scope of the Barbara Project and the initial findings of the research.