Invest in Data, Speculate on Interfaces:
The Long-Term Strategy of the HCI Bibliography
Gary Perlman,
director@hcibib.org,
http://www.hcibib.org
Note: Red and *'s indicate "hotness".
The idea for the HCI Bibliography started with an online bibliography for
a curriculum module on UI Development prepared for the
Software Engineering Institute in 1988.
I thought the resource was useful
because it had abstracts of articles and
tables of contents of books.
It had 196 records.
I had the idea that a distributed group project could coordinate
gathering bibliographic records,
possibly with authors contributing abstracted entries out of self-interest.
Although that did not work for a variety of reasons,
people were generally supportive of the idea,
and the project started releasing files in 1992
primarily based on work-study student and later OCR input.
Around the same time, the HILITES project was trying to
move from a research project into a commercial
"Information Service for the World HCI Community" (Shackel et al, 1992).
I sent a survey to about 500 registered user/sites and
concluded that HILITES was priced out of the reach of most users,
especially when matched up against a free service like the HCI Bibliography
(even though it offered less coverage and fewer services).
HILITES disappeared.
Shackel. et al (1992)
"HILITES -- The Information Service for the World HCI Community"
SIGCHI Bulletin, 1992 24:3 40-49.
Initially, the HCI Bibliography was simply a database
at Ohio State University; there was no internal support to
provide the resources for an online search service.
Services occasionally were offered, but usually
without updating the data, and people complained to the project.
ACM SIGCHI, a long-time supporter of the project,
agreed to fund a site, which I requested on its own domain
(hcibib.org) in case the database and service ever had to move
(and to maintain some legal distance between the project and ACM).
A search service,
based on the glimpse search engine,
started in April of 1998.
The HCI Bibliography has been promoted primarily through informal
announcements (magazines, newsletters, Usenet, listserv).
It is listed, although often incorrectly, on a variety of services
like Yahoo.
The project home page has received about 100 "hits" per day,
and the search service has processed over 5000 searches per month.
The main conclusion one can draw from the search logs is
that most searches are not nearly as effective as they could be
(and this probably generalizes to ineffective use of other search services).
The advent of the Web during the life of the HCIBIB
simplified the delivery issues for the data and supporting files.
Still, it is a fundamental principle that the data files
(journal volumes, conference proceedings) be independent
of how they are delivered.
The data files remained in their original extended UNIX Refer format,
but could be reformatted and displayed in HTML.
Software tools on the server side could readily manipulate
and summarize the data (e.g., reports of the most frequent authors,
number of publications by year, tables of journals by years, etc.).
The goals for the near future of the hcibib.org is to better integrate
itself into the research needs of the HCI community.
This has already started with increased access to the world's HCI publications:
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Integration of Internet Resources:
In addition to traditional publications,
the HCI Bibliography began in May of 1998
to catalogue resources on the Internet.
This began with a compilation of resources
for internationalization and localization
of user interfaces, and continued with an ongoing effort
to intergate most Indexes of HCI (e.g., Keith Intone's
HCI Virtual Library) to simplify the task of the researcher.
In its first 3 months, over 750 resources were catalogued,
and in addition to being retrievable from hcibib.org,
they are used to generate several Web index pages for SIGCHI
and one for SIGCAPH.
Each generated page has a link suggestion form to
continue the cataloging process,
and periodic checks are run
to identify bad links.
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Integration of Full Text:
In addition to basic bibliographic information and abstracts,
the HCI Bibliography has started to incorporate links
to online full text. Publishers such as ACM and Elsevier
offer (for a fee) journals and proceedings online
(e.g., as PDF files). After searching across most
major HCI sources, authorized users can then have
immediate access to full text.
As of September of 1998,
there are about 4000 links to full text
for traditional publications.
Integrating links to Web resources and to full text
do not really require much insight or expertise.
They are simply information to be added to records
(although potentially more volatile than
information about more traditional forms of publication).
More difficult to estimate are the ways of better supporting
research in HCI, itself a research area far broader than HCI.
Some active areas of work include:
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Search Assistance:
To better support the search process,
the hcibib.org search service is being used as a laboratory
for providing assistance to researchers.
A collection of patterns inside the search service
is used to suggest possible next steps to improve search
(e.g., when/how to narrow/broaden a search).
The presentation and use of suggestions
is currently being evaluations with the Web access logs.
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Annotation Support:
To allow researchers to gather records,
bookmarks (in the form of queries to retrieve a record)
were added to the HCI Bibliography,
with the eventual goal of being able to
annotate records, merge annotations and records, etc.
Measuring success in these areas is difficult.
Subjective satisfaction may be high even though
important information has been missed
(either inside or outside the database coverage).
There is also the of making X% of the information
so much more accessible than the other 100-X%
that the remainder is never found by many researchers.
Search engines, data visualizations, and the like
will continue to improve, but many users are
not finding the information they hope for,
and they are not using it as effectively as possible.
Long-term,
the data in the HCI Bibliography will survive
and be useful for a variety of purposes.
If an online resource hopes to remain useful,
it must separate data from its use.