User Interface Design
for a Large-Scale Computer
Science Research Digital Library
Min-Yen Kan
Department of Computer Science
National University of Singapore
HFE SERC 2006
Finding research on human factors
Your prof. assigns you
to do a survey paper
on HFE. What do you
do?
Type “human factors”
in the search engine
HFE SERC 2006
The domain of scholarly information
But scholarly information has structure. We should leverage it.
• Producers publish information in a way to be digested easily
– Identifiable sections, strong discourse structure
– Reference and citations that form a citation network
• Consumers have ordinary tasks that they need to do with the
literature
– Literature survey
– Subject expert identification
– Technique / methodology to solve problem
– Find equivalent / abstract version of specific problem
HFE SERC 2006
Research Objectives
Have existing system – CiteSeer (700K PDF files covering an
approximate 30% of computer science literature)
Have some advanced services implemented (query expansion,
spelling correction, keyphrase extraction, presentation
synchronization and citation typing)
Q: How to best integrate?
Find suitable methods to integrate advanced scholarly digital
library services with existing system
1. Map advanced services into work packages
2. Uncover new requirements that need new services to
supported
HFE SERC 2006
Scope
Broadly: user interface design w.r.t. information
seeking
Narrowing it down:
• Limit to computer science
• Limit to postgraduate students as user base
• Be implementation-aware, but generalize results for
for research agenda
• Limit to dataset where full text of paper and
presentation is available
HFE SERC 2006
Challenges
Project requires acute awareness of:
• Different levels of expertise in user base
– need to be task-aware
• Legacy user interface effects
• The evolution of information need over a project
• Privacy issues with annotations, session data
• Dynamic HTML capabilities
• Constraints of accessibility given by alternate
resources
HFE SERC 2006
Applications
Will be applied to our local version of CiteSeer
• Intent to make Singapore a key stop for CS students
doing literature information seeking
Further links between PI and NUS Libraries on porting
such UI research to library catalog design