NoteCards is a general hypermedia environment designed to help people work with ideas. Its intended users are authors, designers, and other intellectual laborers engaged in analyzing information, designing artifacts, and generally processing ideas. The system provides these users with a variety of hypermedia-based tools for collecting, representing, managing, interrelating, and communicating ideas. This paper presents the NoteCards system as a foil against which to explore some of the major limitations of the current generation of hypermedia systems. In doing so, this paper highlights seven of the major issues that must be addressed in the next generation of hypermedia systems. These seven issues are: search and query, composite nodes, virtual structures, computational engines, versioning, collaborative work, and tailorability. For each of these issues, the papers describes the limitations inherent in NoteCards and the prospects for doing improving the situation in future systems.

Soon many people will retrieve information from the Web using handheld, palmsized or even smaller computers. Although these computers have dramatically increased in sophistication, their display size is -- and will remain -- much smaller than their conventional, desktop counterparts. Currently, browsers for these devices present web pages without taking account of the very different display capabilities. As part of a collaborative project with Reuters, we carried out a study into the usability impact of small displays for retrieval tasks. Users of the small screen were 50% less effective in completing tasks than the large screen subjects. Small screen users used a very substantial number of scroll activities in attempting to complete the tasks. Our study also provided us with interesting insights into the shifts in approach users seem to make when using a small screen device for retrieval. These results suggest that the metaphors useful in a full screen desktop environment are not the ...

: This chapter offers recommendations for potential authors of hypertext documents based on the experience of designing a hypertext system and of creating a series of substantial hypertext databases on personal computers and larger workstations. Advice on choosing projects, identifying useful author tool features, and structuring knowledge is presented. Additional issues such as the design of the root document, article size, and conversion from existing databases are covered. While hypertext has exciting potentials, the dangers of poor design must be overcome to create attractive and effective products. This report appeared in Barrett, Ed (Editor), The Society of Text, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1989). Ben Shneiderman is a Professor of Computer Science, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and a Member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, all at the University of Maryland, College Park. 2 Reflections on Authoring, Editing, and Managin...

Abstract: In recent years, the use of small screen devices has multiplied rapidly. This paper covers a number of different issues which arise when digital libraries are used in combination with such displays. Known limitations of small screens are presented to the Digital Library community. Two evaluations of pilot small-screen DL systems are presented, with some unexpected cultural and socio-technical concerns which arose. The pilot systems also demonstrate the delivery of small-screen access using an existing popular DL system. 1.

Hypertexts present methods to read online texts that are different from those available when reading standard linear texts. Hypertexts give readers more flexibility in choosing paths through the text and in finding relevant information. However, research in hypertext has often shown little or no advantages over the equivalent linear text.

Mobile computing has attracted attention in the past few years owing to technology advances. However, viewing documents on a mobile device isn’t easy because of the limited display size, CPU power, and bandwidth. This is an obstacle for wireless Web browsing because there is no automatic transformation of HTML 1 documents designed for display on large screens to small PDA screens. The same problem occurs in devices for Web access (or Web-like access) on television. Although televisions are generally larger than most computer monitors, the relatively low resolution and long viewing distance reduces the amount of information they can display. In this article, small displays are devices that display a small amount of information for comfortable user viewing, because either the screens are physically small or they have very low resolution. Small displays increase the burden on Web page authors and application designers because they must consider all possible display capabilities of user devices when creating a Web page. To ease such tasks, this article presents an automatic document segmentation and presentation system. The DSPS has three primary