Bibliographies on Human-Computer Interaction

ACM interactions, Volume 2, No. 3, pp. 7-9

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

The most relevant links are listed under Bibliographies

Table of Contents

Introduction

This is the fifth installment on resources on HCI. All previous, current, and future installments are available on the World-Wide Web at: http://www.acm.org/~perlman/interactions/resources.html.

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:
  1. The HILITES Database, with over 30,000 entries (see B. Shackel et al, SIGCHI Bulletin, 24:3, 40-49, 1992). HILITES has been under development for over a decade and is an ambitious attempt to provide all the information for the world HCI community. It has a full-time staff covering a very broad base of publications. Originally government-funded, it is moving to becoming self-supporting, and now distributes the database for about $1000. Although the database is online, it is not generally accessible from the internet; instead, access is on a DOS CD-ROM with search software.
  2. The HCI Bibliography has about 12,500 entries (see the World-Wide Web page of the HCI Bibliography at http://www.hcibib.org/, or go directly to the HCI Bibliography FTP directory at ftp.hcibib.org. The HCI Bibliography began in 1989 after I found it useful to have online access to the abstracted bibliography I used for the SEI Curriculum Module on User Interface Development (see my earlier column on Resources for HCI Education). In contrast to the HILITES project, the HCI Bibliography Project has no paid staff because one of its goals is to provide free access to information. Despite this restriction, the bibliographic records in the database are validated with statistical quality control. In contrast to the comprehensive HILITES, the HCI Bibliography focuses on the core journals, conferences, and books on HCI. The HCI Bibliography has depended on over 100 volunteers, occasional funding from ACM SIGCHI, and on the UNIX and internet infrastructure provided to people in Computer and Information Science at The Ohio State University.
A survey of registered HCI Bibliography users suggested that people would be willing to pay for access to the database, perhaps the same rate as people pay for a journal subscription or an expensive book, but not much more. Although smaller and more focused on the material that is easy to gather, the HCI Bibliography is free for people to copy and use whenever and wherever they want, not just from a CD-ROM. And one motivation for getting unrestricted high quality data online is that once it is online, it will be online forever. That philosophy motivated the project's motto: bibliotheca magnetica patens omnibus hominis-ordinatorisque societas. The bleary eyes of the volunteers motivated the project logo: the bloodshot eye.

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. A new WWW site for HCI information is at the popular Yahoo site which has indexed almost 40,000 internet sites. Yahoo originated at Stanford, and is now at http://www.yahoo.com. Its HCI page is http://www.yahoo.com/Science/Computer_Science/Human_Computer_Interaction/.

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

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