Anna Zacchi

Supporting personal collections across digital libraries in spatial hypertext

Creating, maintaining, or using a digital library requires the manipulation of digital documents. Information workspaces provide a visual representation allowing users to collect, organize, annotate, and author information. The visual knowledge builder (VKB) helps users access, collect, annotate, and combine materials from digital libraries and other sources into a personal information workspace. VKB has been enhanced to include direct search interfaces for NSDL and Google. Users create a visualization of search results while selecting and organizing materials for their current activity. Additionally, metadata applicators have been added to VKB. This interface allows the rapid addition of metadata to documents and aids the user in the extraction of existing metadata for application to other documents. A study was performed to compare the selection and organization of documents in VKB to the commonly used tools of a Web browser and a word processor. This study shows the value of visual workspaces for such effort but points to the need for subdocument level objects, ephemeral visualizations, and support for moving from visual representations to metadata.

Effects of display configurations on document triage

Document triage is the practice of quickly determining the merit and disposition of relevant documents. This practice involves selection of documents from a document overview and quick forms of reading: skimming, reading short portions of a longer document, and navigating through headings, indices, and tables of contents. Earlier studies of document triage practice showed considerable overhead related to window management during transitions between the document overview and reading interfaces. This study examines the impact of multiple display configurations on document triage practice. In particular, it compares (1) configurations with same and different size displays, and (2) configurations with and without user control over which activity is performed on which display. Results show a significant increase in the number of transitions between activities when a multi-display configuration is introduced although there is no significant difference between the different multiple display configurations. Additionally, user activity with a document was positively correlated with an overall assessment of document value.

Patterns of reading and organizing information in document triage

People engaged in knowledge work must often rapidly identify valuable material from within large sets of potentially relevant documents. Document triage is a type of sensemaking task that involves skimming documents to get a sense of their content, evaluating documents to assess their worth in the context of the current activity, and organizing documents to prepare for their subsequent use and more in-depth reading. We have performed a study of document triage by collecting multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to characterize how 24 subjects read about a new topic and assessed and organized a set of 40 relevant Web documents. Our results indicate that there are multiple strategies for document triage, each involving different styles of reading, interacting, and organizing. Common strategies include: 1) focused reading early in the task, relegating the organizing until later in the process; 2) skimming performed in tandem with organizing, which relies on gaining an incremental understanding of the topic; and 3) metadata-based organizing, a strategy that stresses working with document surrogates to minimize the time spent reading. The findings suggest ways applications may better support the intertwined nature of the browsing, reading, and organizing activities in document triage.

Personal environment management

We report on a study of the practices people employ to organize resources for their activities on their computers. Today the computer is the main working environment for many people. People use computers to do an increasing number of tasks. We observed different patterns of organization of resources across the desktop and the folder structure. We describe several strategies that people employ to customize the environment in order to easily perform their activities, access their resources, and overview their current tasks.

Organizing Documents to Support Activities

This paper describes a study in the wild of software for document organization aimed at supporting activities. A preliminary study of current practices with traditional tools was followed by the design and development of a program called Docksy. Docksy introduces workspaces explicitly zoned by movable panels and features document descriptors augmented with tags, comments, and checkboxes. Docksy was deployed for at least two weeks and users’ practices with the new tool were studied. The aim of the study was to see how the new tool was appropriated and how people used the new features. The workspace structured in panels was shown to support users in clustering and separating documents, in having a holistic view of the document space, in locating files inside a workspace, and in managing temporary files. The study also shows how tags, comments, and checkboxes afforded the use of documents as explicit items in a workflow. The study suggests Docksy supports users in a variety of information and activity management tasks, including new practices for emerging activities.

A framework for securing the signaling plane in the emergency services IP network (ESINet)

IP-based emergency systems (or Next Generation 9–1–1) are being designed to allow any type of communication device, from any access network, to make IP-based emergency calls. A special purpose IP network — an Emergency Services IP Network (ESINet) — is being planned by public safety agencies. In this paper, we address the challenges on defining a framework for managing the security of the signaling messages in the context of IP-based emergency calls. The challenges rely on choosing a security mechanism that protects the signaling, is practical for implementation by different parties, and meets the requirements of citizen-to-authority emergency calls.