Structuring Facilities in Digital Libraries

摘要

Digital libraries offer much promise for patrons and many challenges for system designers and implementers. One important issue that faces digital library system designers is the type of support provided to patrons for intellectual work. Although many researchers have note the desirability of robust hypermedia structurign facilities in digital library systems, this research has tended to focus on navigational hypermedia (primarily sued for associative storage and retrieval) only. Many other types of hypermedia, such as spatial, issue-based, and taxonomic, have bene ignored. We briefly review some of our experiences with builing digital library systems and discuss some of he lessons we learned from oru initial prototypes. We then present a scenario of digital library work that illustrates many of the kinds of taks we have observed users of our systems perform. We sue this scenario to suggest a potential area of improvement for current hypermedia support in digital library systems and discuss some of oru initial work in this area. Finally, we present some directions of future work and some concluding remarks.