Supporting professional readers of online documents

ABSTRACT

Reading online documents for professional purposes such as formulating a piece of advice is the subject of a 4 year PhD project. A first study in this project indicated that readers who had to write a piece of advice based on electronic sources had a superficial task conception. Interacting with the online environment (note-taking, and the retrieval of information) played an important role during reading. Readers frequently copied citations from the source documents. These citations were evaluated only during advice writing. Based on these observations, we set up a second study that addresses note-taking in a writing-from-sources task. We compare the benefits of an advanced annotation tool with the benefits of a basic annotation tool. The preliminary results of this study will be available at the time of the conference. In the future we will evaluate the benefits of navigational tools.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
annotation, document design, reading