Prototype interface for scientific literature

I had an "Aha!" moment about 2 weeks ago while reading Pragmatic Ajax by Justin Gehtland, Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer (highly recommended, by the way). The authors use Google Maps as a classic example of Ajaxian techniques and it struck me that the interface for Google Maps is almost identical to what we've been envisioning for zooming & panning digitized scientific literature with JPEG2000. One idea led to another and 12 hours later I had the beginnings of a web interface. I started putting ideas into PowerPoint (one of the easiest tools to use for prototyping) and came up with the following:

Download 4MB PowerPoint (zipped)