Human-information interaction for digital libraries: from document repositories to knowledge environments

Abstract

As digital libraries become larger and more complex, there is a greater need for them to support intellectual and creative work with the information they contain. This dissertation concerns the evolution of digital libraries from document repositories to knowledge environments. As document repositories, digital libraries help people find useful information. As knowledge environments, digital libraries would help people use that information to develop understanding, acquire insight, solve problems, and create knowledge. This dissertation explores the role of interaction for developing digital libraries as knowledge environments. It gives special, though not exclusive, attention to interaction with visual representations. Visual representations can make information more perceptually and cognitively accessible. When interactive capabilities are introduced, visual representations can be dynamically adapted to the contextual needs of individual users. By interacting with information—in physical or digital form, encoded visually or otherwise—people are better able to make sense of information, comprehend complex structures, and integrate new information into their existing knowledge base. In sum, interaction has epistemic benefits and can help people capitalize on the epistemic potential of digital libraries. The dissertation proceeds in three stages. The first stage develops a conceptual framework for reconceptualizing digital libraries as knowledge environments. The second stage concerns the epistemic benefits of interaction. It develops a second framework that characterizes the micro-level interactions people use during cognitively-complex, open-ended, and information-rich activities. These interactions are defined independent of specific technologies, thereby providing a stable design vocabulary even in the face of technological change. The third stage evaluates the analytical capabilities of the interaction framework by using it to study how people triage documents. Triage occurs when people must rapidly assimilate and evaluate more information than they have time to read in-depth. The findings suggest that the interaction framework can be used to analytically describe many salient aspects of knowledge-based activities relevant to digital libraries, while also highlighting limitations of these frameworks and paths for future research.