Gary Perlman (acm.org/perlman) was born and raised in Montréal, during which time he attended two Stanley Cup final games. He left Québec after high school, to avoid CEGEP, and attended the University of Rochester. Dr. Perlman's Ph.D. is in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego, where he was supported by an NSERC fellowship from Canada. In additional to over 20 years of consulting in information technology, he has held research and academic positions at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University (Software Engineering Institute), Ohio State University, and at the OCLC Online Computer Library Center (oclc.org), where he is a consulting research scientist and is primarily responsible for user interfaces for library information systems, particularly multilingual and accessible systems. His research interests are in making information technology more useful and usable for people. He is the author of over 75 journal and conference articles, including one reprinted in The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. After 30 years in the United States, he moved back to Montréal in 2003, when his wife accepted a Canada Chair at McGill, moving his R&D job at OCLC to Québec, as a telecommuter.
He is best known in the HCI community as the director of the HCI Bibliography (hcibib.org), a free-access online resource of over 36,000 records. The H-C-I-BIB, as it is called by elite bibliographers, grew out of his efforts 1988-89 at the Software Engineering Institute to develop a curriculum module on user interface development. As part of the process, he had work-study students enter abstracted bibliographic records, which he found useful to have online. He thought, naïvely, that if a few students could add hundreds of records, the HCI community could add thousands. This led to a proposal to the SIGCHI community to create an online bibliography, which was met with uniform skepticism. Undaunted, work-study program at Ohio State University provided the labour needed to add the initial few thousand records to the HCIBIB. Over a hundred volunteer validators made thousands of corrections, producing a high quality bibliography. Publishers were willing to give permissions to have their abstracts online, sometimes requiring the urging of their editorial boards. In 1991, the first article on the HCIBIB appeared in the SIGCHI Bulletin, boasting of over 1000 entries. Support from SIGCHI and Apple Computer followed, which helped to add structure and boost productivity.
After a variety of awkward access schemes, the HCIBIB moved to its own domain, hcibib.org, in 1997, and started offering its search service in 1998, both hosted by SIGCHI (sigchi.org). At around the same time, the HCI Webliography started cataloguing websites. Adding one to two thousand bibliographic records a year, the HCIBIB has grown to over 36,000 records, including over 1800 websites. A new search engine was added at the end of 2006, offering new capabilities to thousands of people interested in HCI.
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