Review - Use and usability in a digital library search system.
Michael Lesk:
Review - Use and usability in a digital library search system.
ACM SIGMOD Digital Review 1: (1999) BibTeX
Review
This paper reviews the user interface design history of the MARIAN library
system at Virginia Tech. They interviewed users, collected detailed session
logs, and collected overall statistics. The results stressed the importance
of simplicity and directness in the interface, so that it is obvious to users
what needs to be done to submit a search. Also, screen space, although in
short supply, was used on instructional paragraphs. All this makes sense and
is very practical information. I differ with the authors on whether the roughly
one-third of the sessions that involve more than one query really represent
proof that "query refinement is an important human activity", and I also note
their finding that most queries were one field covering one term. I suspect
that fast response and document clustering would be of more use that the
complexities of query sets and fielded searching. The authors plan to proceed
to including adaptive (personalized) behavior in MARIAN; I think the results
of that research will also be interesting.
Copyright © 1999 by the author(s).
Review published with permission.
References
- [1]
- Robert K. France, Lucy T. Nowell, Edward A. Fox, Rani A. Saad, Jianxin Zhao:
Use and usability in a digital library search system.
CoRR cs.DL/9902013: (1999) BibTeX
BibTeX
Digital Review - DBLP:
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