User Interfaces for Information Retrieval on the WWW

Author: Gary Marchionini,  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

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Abstract

Information seeking has become increasingly interactive as tools and services on the WWW have evolved. I claim that the only way to achieve substantial advances in search and browse capabilities is to combine research and development in human-computer interaction with research and development in information retrieval to create highly interactive systems that engage the user in defining their needs iteratively and going beyond retrieval to understanding the corpus and the retrieved information. This human-computer information retrieval (HCIR) perspective will be illustrated with examples from the Open Video Project, a digital video library for the education and research communities (www.open-video.org), and the Govstat Project, an effort to design interfaces, information architectures, and online help for non-specialists looking for statistical information from government websites (www.ils.unc.edu/govstat). Our experience demonstrates how good interface design and usability testing leads to improved information services.

About the author

Gary Marchionini is Cary C. Boshamer Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina where he teaches courses in human-information interaction, interface design and testing, and digital libraries. He is the PI for a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation, Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics: Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network. He leads the development of a digital video repository, The Open Video Project and is PI for a NSF-funded project to develop and test interfaces for video retrieval and browsing. He also leads a project "Annotating Structured Documents" supported by Microsoft. He was PI for a U.S. Department of Education Challenge Grant project, the Baltimore Learning Community. He served for ten years as the Director of Evaluation for the Perseus Project (a digital library devoted to classical culture). He was the Conference Chair for ACM Digital Library '96 Conference and was program chair for the 2002 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. He served as an at large member of the board of directors for the American Society for Information Science & Technology from 1998-2001.

He is Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transaction on Information Systems. Professor Marchionini has had grants or contracts from the National Science Foundation, Council on Library Resources, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Kellogg Foundation, and NASA, among others. He has published over 100 articles, chapters and reports in a variety of books and journals. He is author of a book titled Information Seeking in Electronic Environments published by Cambridge University Press.

Current interests and projects are related to: interfaces that support information seeking and information retrieval; WWW-based statistical information; alternative representations for electronic documents; multimedia browsing strategies; digital libraries; information architecture; and evaluation of interactive media, especially for learning and teaching.