8th DELOS Workshop on User Interfaces in Digital Libraries
by Preben Hansen
The 8th DELOS Workshop on User Interfaces in Digital Libraries
was held in Stockholm, Sweden, 21-23 October 1998. The DELOS Working
Group is an action of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative. During the workshop, a ‘mini-workshop’ was held, together with
participants from the 4th ERCIM User Interfaces for All Workshop,
another ERCIM Working Group, that was held from 19-21 October
1998. 21 participants, including guest speakers attended the workshop.
Eleven presentations were made during the workshop.
A Digital Library is the integration of several different components
and will include a range of content and services, as well as a
large and diverse group of users. It is important to develop an
understanding of the overall tasks and interactions users are
engaged in when entering a Digital Library. We interact constantly
with our environment through different communication mechanisms
and processes. Information seeking and retrieval in Digital Libraries
is but a special case of such a process. Analysis and evaluation
of user, systems and interactions are needed to successfully build
future Digital Libraries.
Presentations
The workshop started with a ‘Challenge paper’ (Preben Hansen and
Jussi Karlgren, SICS). The paper summarized some important research
issues raised 25 years ago related to information retrieval (IR)
and user interfaces (UI) and its relevance for the workshop. The
authors found that some of the questions raised then were still
valid today, such as the characteristics of the user, the task,
the information content and medium, the computer and IR techniques
and the role of evaluation and feedback in the redesign cycle,
among others. However, there has also emerged new research areas
such as multimedia content, multimodal interaction, multilingual
information and users and distributed systems and collections.
Our guest speaker, Professor Nicholas Belkin, Rutgers University,
provided a ‘road-map’ on important issues for Digital Libraries
in his paper ‘Understanding and supporting Multiple Information
Seeking Behaviours in a Single Interface Framework’. First, Belkin
presented a definition of a Digital Library and what functions
need to be supported in such a framework. Furthermore, Nick Belkin
described his and his group’s work within the third TIPSTER research
program. The goal of the project is to identify and classify different
information seeking strategies (ISSs), characterize sequential
structures of ISSs, identify specific combinations of IR techniques
appropriate for different ISSs, and construct and evaluate system
which adapts to support different ISSs in the course of a single
information seeking episode.
Constantine Stephanidis, ICS-FORTH, our second guest speaker,
raised some critical issues for interaction design in digital
libraries in the light of HCI and Digital Libraries. Among the
main issues and challenges mentioned were diverse user groups,
variety in the context of use, and technological proliferation.
The author also proposed a way to deal with the design of Digital
Libraries containing three phases: Design processes and techniques,
Implementation, and Evaluation.
The paper presentations covered areas such as multilingual aspects
(Nuño Miguel Antunes Freire, INESC and Aarno Jarno Tenni, VTT);
evaluation of information systems (Silvana Mangiaracina, CNR and
Demosthenes Akoumianakis, ICS-FORTH); agent-based system of semantical
information retrieval (Kuldar Taveter, VTT); visualization (Francesca
Costabile, Bari University); implementation of user interfaces
(Donatella Castelli, CNR and László Kovács, SZTAKI) and finally,
genres and clustering (by Johan Dewe and Niklas Wolkert, Netsolutions
AB).
Discussion summary
Some important issues discussed during the workshop:
- information seeking and retrieval as embedded activities within
Digital Libraries
- techniques and methods to analyse, and evaluate different systems
as well as different users, their behaviour, tasks and the ideas
behind the systems developed
- support interactions with information, such as texts and multimedia
and access to multilingual information in information seeking
activities
- future Digital Libraries will encompass alternative modalities
for representations of information seeking activities.
The papers from the workshop will be published as workshop proceedings
at http://www.ercim.org/publication/workshop_reports.html.
Please contact:
Preben Hansen - SICS
Tel: +46 8 633 1554
E-mail: preben@sics.se
