How will we read digital library materials? This paper describes the reading practices of an on-going reading group, and how these practices changed when we introduced XLibris, a digital library reading appliance that uses a pen tablet computer to provide a paper-like interface. We interviewed group members about their reading practices, observed their meetings, and analyzed their annotations, both when they read a paper document and when they read using XLibris. We use these data to characterize their analytic reading, reference use, and annotation practices. We also describe the use of the Reader's Notebook, a list of clippings that XLibris computes from a reader's annotations. Implications for digital libraries stem from our findings on reading and mobility, the complexity of analytic reading, the social nature of reference following, and the unselfconscious nature of readers' annotations. Keywords Digital library, reading appliance, e-book, paper document metaphor, active reading...

Prototypes are widely recognized to be a core means of exploring and expressing designs for interactive computer artifacts. It is common practice to build prototypes in order to represent different states of

this paper, we develop and articulate a set of design principles for constructing - in a systematic and extensible manner - multi-hand gestures on touch surfaces that can sense multiple points and shapes, and can also accommodate conventional point-based input

This study deals with the problems users encounter in their daily work with computers and the typical practices that they employ. Sixteen daily computer users were interviewed about their habits and problems that they encountered during document classification and retrieval. For both these areas, we provide an overview of identified user practices and a citation-based analysis of the problems users encountered, including those related to the use of the screen real estate (the actual desktop). Two types of problems were identified: (1) Problems that concern the actual use of the system installed on the computer. (2) Problems that arise when people realise that they are using a system that does not allow for the desired work or organizational functions sought. We were able to show that skill continues to be an important factor with respect to the ease of using today’s systems. We suggest the following necessary improvements for the evolution of personal information systems: A storage facility that represents the user’s view of information; replacing pure technical file metadata with more user-friendly attributes; and introduction of annotations as a new information type.

Many email users, especially managers, receive too many email messages to read in the time available to them. The solutions available today often require programming skills on the part of the user to define rules for prioritizing messages or moving messages to folders. We propose a different approach: categorize messages in the inbox with predefined rules that do not require maintenance and are scalable to handle anything from 50 to thousands of messages.

In this paper we report the findings from a field study of legal research in a first-tier law school and on the resulting redesign of XLibris, a next-generation e-book. We first characterize a work setting in which we expected an e-book to be a useful interface for reading and otherwise using a mix of physical and digital library materials, and explore what kinds of reading-related functionality would bring value to this setting. We do this by describing important aspects of legal research in a heterogeneous information environment, including mobility, reading, annotation, link following and writing practices, and their general implications for design. We then discuss how our work with a user community and an evolving e-book prototype allowed us to examine tandem issues of usability and utility, and to redesign an existing e-book user interface to suit the needs of law students. The study caused us to move away from the notion of a stand-alone reading device and toward the concept of a document laptop, a platform that would provide wireless access to information resources, as well as support a fuller spectrum of reading-related activities.

In this paper the results of a two-year ethnographic study of the personal document management of 28 information workers is described. Both the paper and digital domain were taken into account during the study. The results reaffirmed that document management is strongly related to task management. Digital tools do not adequately support two important user needs related to task management, namely that documents should be embedded within meaningful (task-related) context information, and that they should be easily accessible for regrouping as the task goes on. In contrast, paper supports these needs very well. Following a discussion of personal document management using paper, email, and digital file folder structures, six implications are outlined for the design of digital document management systems that combine the advantages of both domains. ACM Classification: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Keywords: Paper-digital integration, document management, paper, email, ethnography.

6 Acknowledgements 7 1. Introduction 8 1.1. Spatialization of user interfaces........................................................... .... 8 1.2. Researching navigation in a textual virtual environment..................................10 1.3. Ontology of environmental terms............................................................11 1.4. Structure of this thesis............................................................... .........12 2. Spatial cognition of humans 14 2.1. What is "space"?................................................... ............................14 2.1.1. Philosophical and physical concepts of space.............................14 2.1.2. The mathematical view of space.............................................15 2.1.2.1. Metric spaces ........................................................16 2.1.2.2. Topological space...................................................17 2.1.2.3. Graph theory...........................................................

Most document or information management systems rely on hierarchies to organise documents (e.g. files, email messages or web bookmarks). However, the rigid structures of hierarchical schemes do not mesh well with the more fluid nature of everyday document practices. This paper describes Presto, a prototype system that allows users to organise their documents entirely in terms of the properties those documents hold for users. Properties provide a uniform mechanism for managing, coding, searching, retrieving and interacting with documents. We concentrate in particular on the challenges that property-based approaches present and the architecture we have developed to tackle them.

This paper describes a new desktop metaphor/system called TimeScape. A user of TimeScape can spatially arrange information on the desktop. Any desktop item can be removed at any time, and the system supports timetravel to the past or the future of the desktop. The combination of spatial information arrangement and chronological navigation allows the user to organize and archive electric information without being bothered by document folders or file classification problems.