ACM interactions, Volume 2, No. 3, pp. 7-9
Gary Perlman, Ohio State University
Table of Contents
This column is on Bibliographies on HCI, a topic closely associated with me because I have directed the HCI Bibliography Project since 1989. I'll discuss a variety of bibliographic resources in addition to the contents of the HCI Bibliography. These bibliographic resources can help students learn about HCI, researchers find relevant background, and developers find examples of the state of the art. It's easier to browse or search through a bibliography than to find publications in a library. It's a lot easier if the materials are online and internet accessible.
Bibliographic information traditionally contains basic publication information about a published work: author(s), title, date, publisher, pages, etc. Often, bibliographic records include summary information such as keywords, abstracts, and section headings. In some cases, bibliographic records contain information about references -- either their number or actual citations. Bibliographic records do not, however, contain the full text, tables, or figures in published works, so in terms of electronic publication, bibliographic records represent what is easy to represent about publications without addressing the more difficult issues of document content representation. Bibliographic records give you enough information to decide if a publication is worth getting for a full read.
There are two types of bibliographic collections:
collections on specific topics,
spanning many publications such as journals,
conferences, books, etc.,
often annotated by the bibliographer;
comprehensive collections, covering many topics
within a field.
I'll cover the comprehensive ones first,
and then turn to specialized/annotated bibliographies.
Comprehensive Bibliographies on HCI
There are (at least) two comprehensive bibliographic databases on HCI:
The HCI Bibliography is primarily a database of conference proceedings and journal volumes. Each module contains records of all the publications in the conference or journal volume. Sometimes a module is broken up to keep the file sizes manageable (some conferences have hundreds of papers, which would result in files with hundreds of thousands of characters, files that would create problems for many mailers). Currently 22 conferences are covered back to about 1980, and 11 journals are covered back to their first volume. For example, the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, recently renamed the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, is covered back to 1969.
The HCI Bibliography also contains special files on books, edited collections of articles, reports, and videos on HCI. There are answers to frequently asked questions on publishers, professional organizations, and suggested readings. There is even an online copy of the ACM Computing Reviews Classification System of keywords.
The HCI Bibliography is on the World-Wide Web at:
http://www.hcibib.org/,
and it is available via anonymous ftp in:
ftp://ftp.hcibib.org/.
You can access the HCI Bibliography email server by sending mail to
director@hcibib.org
in which you should ask for the index with Send:index;
instructions will accompany the index.
Other Bibliographic Resources
All three major HCI web indexes have bibliographic sections,
and these are a good source for specialized bibliographies
and bibliographies for related disciplines.
Finally, Alf-Christian Achilles' Computer Science Bibliographies merges many sources of bibliographic information. It resides at http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/index.html, but it is so popular that there are many mirror sites, one of which is: http://www.cs.unc.edu/bibliography-mirror.
Next resources department:
HCI Organizations and Mailing Lists
Links on this Page