Marked up to be included in the ACH/ALLC 2005 Conference Abstracts book.
None
This session will focus on the importance of measuring how communities of users interact with digital objects. By drawing on user-performance data and metadata generated for secondary repositories, we explore ways to enhance use and access of documents and digital libraries..
Speaker 1 proposes an approach to representing the structure of a document based on the way readers or users interact with it in the context of a deliberative task. This approach contrasts with other ways to model the structure of documents including approaches which map authorial intention and those which rely upon a well-known information model or genre. This presentation will highlight the benefits of understanding the structure of documents based on the rhetorical reading/using strategies of those who interact with them. These structures can be rendered as
Speakers 2 and 3 will examine the role of secondary repositories can play in enhancing access and interaction for students and scholars in the humanities. The most entrenched a priori models for information structuring and delivery online are derived from library and archival cataloguing practices. In line with digital library best practices, digitized sources are typically cataloged to describe their bibliographic information, along with technical, administrative, and rights metadata. While these practices are essential for preserving the digital object and making it available to users, unfortunately they do so in a language and guise often difficult to understand within the context of use. In addition, materials in digital libraries do not literally
Following the examples in the first paper, speaker 4 will demonstrate an application that can be used to collect user generated metadata. Following the concepts developed in the second paper, speaker 4 will develop the argument in practice that one way we can enhance access to online digital objects is to facilitate the creation of secondary repositories. These repositories will provide discipline/community specific metadata and applications and will allow users to find, use, manipulate and analyze digital objects more easily. To this end, Speaker 4 has developed
Bill Hart-Davidson, Ph.D.
This paper proposes an approach to representing the structure of a document based on the way readers or users interact with it in the context of a deliberative task. This approach contrasts with other ways to model the structure of documents including approaches which map authorial intention and those which rely upon a well-known information model or genre. This presentation will highlight the benefits of understanding the structure of documents based on the rhetorical reading/using strategies of those who interact with them. These structures can be rendered as
There is a great deal of interest today in the idea of building models of texts. One reason is that, with the growth of the Web as a way to reach a wide and diverse audience, publishers of information of many types are now interested in building information structures that support multiple-audience adaptation. Another reason is to maximize the value of content by delivering information that is tailored to a particular task.
For example, imagine the day-to-day work of a claims processing agent for a large insurance company. The agent is responsible for making decisions based on information in documents of various types - claim forms, telephone call records, police and adjustor reports, medical records, even photographs - all stored in electronic policyholder files. There may be discernable patterns in these types of workflows which can be documented and used as the basis for information models that structure information at or below the level of an individual document. The model could allow information contained in all the documents associated with the policyholder file to transform to suit the decision-making needs of the specific users who interact with it.
Creating a system like the one described above would require analyzing and modeling fundamental patterns of document use, defining a basic modeling language for document-mediated interaction that can capture recurrent patterns of user performance. As Moser & Moore (1996) point out, most semantic modeling approaches construct formal text structures based on either author intention or, alternatively, on an information structure presumed to be instantiated in the text. Neither of these approaches is entirely appropriate for creating effective displays of information for potential users. Creating such displays requires a model of the text-mediated interaction between writers and readers which can then be used to define display conditions for a range of information "views" that a given document might support.
Performance-based text structure models differ from other types in that they are not primarily representations of a stable
Dean Rehberger and Joy Palmer
This paper will examine the role of secondary repositories can play in enhancing access and interaction for students and scholars in the humanities. While access to online resources has steadily improved in the last decade, online archives and digital libraries still remain difficult to use, particularly for students and novice users (Arms). In some cases, a good deal of resources have been put into massive digitization initiatives that have opened rich archives of sources to a wide range of users. Yet, the traditional cataloging and dissemination practices of libraries and archives make it difficult for these users to locate and use effectively these sources, especially within scholarly and educational contexts of the humanities. Many digital libraries around the country, large and small, have made admirable efforts toward creating user portals and galleries to enhance the usability of their holdings, but these results are often expensive and labor intensive, often speaking only directly to a small segment of users.
To address these problems, we begin with the assumption that access and preservation are mutually dependent concepts. Preservation and access can no longer be thought of in terms of stand alone files or individual digital objects, but rather must directly impact the ways in which users reuse, repurpose, combine and build complex digital objects. This assumption relies on a more complex meaning for the term in some form in which it can be read, viewed, or otherwise employed constructively
The keys to enhancing access for specific user groups, contexts, and disciplines are to build secondary repositories with resources and tools that allow users to enhance and augment materials (Shabajee), share their work with a community of users (Waller), and easily manipulate the media with simple and intuitive tools (or at least build interfaces that match existing, well-known applications). Users will also need portal spaces that escape the genre of links indexes and become flexible work environments that allow users to become interactive producers (Miller).
Herbert Van de Sompel has proposed a successful system (OpenURL/SFX framework for context sensitive reference linking) for disaggregating reference linking services from e-publishing. In his framework, the service of providing links between references and across e-publisher's digital repositories is separated from the services provided by the e-publishers. In so doing, the service provides seamless interconnectivity between ever-increasing collections of heterogeneous resources
In line with digital library best practices, digitized sources are typically cataloged to describe their bibliographic information, along with technical, administrative, and rights metadata. While these practices are essential for preserving the digital object and making it available to users, unfortunately they do so in a language and guise often difficult to understand within the context of use (Lynch 2003). Even though the author's name, the title of the work, and keywords are essential for describing and locating a digital object, this kind of information is not always the most utilized information for ascertaining the relevance of a digital object. For instance, K-I2 teachers often do not have specific authors or titles in mind when searching for materials for their classes. Teachers more frequently search in terms of grade level, the state and national standards that form the basis of their teaching, or broad overarching topics derived from the required content and benchmark standards (e.g., core democratic values or textbook topics) that tend to display too many search returns to make the information of value.
While cursory studies have indicated these access issues, still very little is known about archival use or how these users express their information needs (Duff, Duff & Johnnson). For digital libraries to begin to fulfill their potential, much research is needed to better understand the processes by which primary repositories are accessed and how information needs are expressed. For example, research needs to address the ways in which teachers integrate content into their pedagogy so that bridges can be built from digital repositories to the educational process, bridges that greatly facilitate the ability of teachers and students to access specific information within the pedagogical process. Recent research strongly suggests that students need conceptual knowledge of information spaces that allow them to create mental models to do strategic and successful searches. As with any primary source, the materials in digital libraries do not literally
Collections can also benefit by defining communities of users. For example, with the recent release of secret White House tapes (
Michael Fegan
Speaker Two will argue that one way we can enhance access to online digital objects (particularly in the humanities) is to facilitate the creation of secondary repositories. These repositories will provide discipline/community specific metadata and applications and will allow users to find, use, manipulate and analyze digital objects more easily.
Even though access by specialist scholars and educators to digital objects has grown at an exponential rate, tangible factors have prevented them from fully taking advantage of these resources in the classroom, where they could provide the conceptual and contextual knowledge of primary objects for their students. When educators do find the materials they need, using objects from various primary repositories to put together presentations and resources for their students and research can be challenging. Beyond merely creating lists of links to primary and secondary resources, assembling galleries of images, segmenting and annotating long audio and video files require far more technical expertise and time than can realistically be expected in the educational context. In addition, even though scholars have a long history of researching archives and are comfortable sifting through records, locating items, and making annotations, comparisons, summaries, and quotations, these processes do not yet translate into online tools. Contemporary bibliographic tools have expanded to allow these users to catalogue and keep notes about media, but they do not allow users to mark specific passages and moments in multimedia, segment it, and return to specific places at a later time. Multimedia and digital repository collections thus remain underutilized in education and research because the tools to manipulate the various formats often
To this end, Speaker Two has developed
This application is an online tool that allows users to easily find, segment, annotate and organize text, image, and streaming media found in traditional online repositories.
A portal page might be created by a scholar-educator who wishes to provide specific and contextualized resources for classroom use, and/or by a student creating a multimedia-rich essay for a class assignment. While these users have the immediate sense that they are working directly with primary objects, it is important to emphasize that primary repository objects are not actually being downloaded and manipulated.
As long as primary repositories maintain persistent URIs for their holdings the pointer to the original digital object will always remain within the secondary repository, which acts as a portal to both the primary collection and contextualizing and interpretive information generated by individuals on items in those collections. This information can be stored in a relational database along with valuable information about the individual, who supplies a profile regarding their scholarly/educational background, and provides information of the specific purposes for this work and the user-group (a class, for example) accessing the materials.
Historians, for example, can browse the portals of other historians working specifically in their research areas or K-12 teachers can browse grade appropriate sections defined by specific grade levels and subjects to see what digital objects other teachers are using or, more important, for time challenged teachers, they can find specific presentations created around standard topics and curriculum frameworks. Users can also perform keyword searches over the annotations created by all users or specific groups of users. A teacher, for instance, can choose to search through only the information in eleventh-grade Civics groups in hopes of finding information that speaks directly to his/her needs. Because users have gathered content from across the Internet and from a variety of digital repositories, searching
Going beyond demonstration, this paper will also dive the latest findings and evaluations based on initial user testing in several classrooms as