CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)
Fridays 12:30-1:50 · Gates B01 · Open to the public- 20 years of speakers
- By year
- By speaker
- Videos: iTunesU · YouTube
November 4, 1994
As anyone who's explored the Internet knows, millisecond access to terabytes of information can be more of a problem than an opportunity. Intellectual property owners of many kinds, eager to tap into the Internet as an inexpensive distribution channel, are seeking ways to make libraries of information available. These libraries can be "virtual," in the sense that they exist only as a collection of pointers to documents, rather than a physical collection. Thus, multiple "card catalogs" and other information navigation tools, potentially reflecting many purposes and points of view, can exist in parallel. Copyright, performance and maintenance problems call for a distributed library model. Formatting and conversion obstacles remain for both documents and "meta-information," although emerging commercial products and standards claim to solve the major problems. Librarians, publishers and electronic forums are undergoing paradigm shifts as their domains increasingly overlap. Publishers find themselves acting like librarians as they build electronic collections of documents; librarians are beginning to behave more like publishers by distributing documents and "packaging" information; electronic forums such as Usenet and CompuServe are becoming social information search and retrieval tools in their own right. The World-Wide Web and related emerging standards for "Uniform Resource Information," combined with databases and search engine-based information "agents," hold great promise for construction of virtual libraries. Important issues of maintainability and scalability continue to beg the question of information structures. Opinion-based navigation and organic models may address these issues. |
|