Diary

Internal Reports

Completed Papers

Papers in Progress

Conference Presentations

Site Visit and Quarterly Reports

Main DLI Page

Web Client- DeLIver

Plan for Iterative Meetings on the Design of the Web Interface

Layout Issues:

The focus of our conversations about the layout of the system has been about the overall layout and functionality of the search screen, the short view of the results, and the long view of the results. The search screen is the entry point for the user in which he or she enters search terms and decides what fields are to be searched. LiveLink allows for the display of two results screens: (a) a short view containing a list of articles that contain the search terms used, and (b) a long view containing detailed information about one article that a user has selected from the list of articles provided in the short view. After our first meeting, members involved in designing the web interface requested a mock up of how the web interface might look taking into account issues of usability and user friendliness. Laura Neuman, from the social science team, provided the mock up which served as a starting point for a discussion of the design of the search page, the short view of results, and the long view of results within the context of the limitations involved in building the interface. From these discussions, some initial decisions were made:

• The long entry view of an item will contain the abstract, the figure caption list, the cited reference list, and author names with affiliations
• The links at the bottom of the short record will be in order - full article in sgml format, full article in pdf format, matches in article, and a link to detailed information about the article. The specific wording of these links was left open for discussion at a later meeting.
• The links at the bottom of the long record will be in order - full article sgml format, full article pdf format.
• There was some discussion about the ordering of the journals (ex. grouping journals together that belong to physics) but this is problematic due to some journals that are multidisciplinary.
• There was discussion about how the citations should be displayed. It was decided to use the standard AIAA format with some exceptions.

Walker, R. E., Stone, A. R., and Shandor, M., "Secondary Gas Injection in a Conical Rocket Nozzle," AIAA Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1963, pp. 334-338

Exceptions that will be made: (a) if there are more that 3 authors then et. al will be used to represent the additional authors in the short format, (b) an "and" will not be used between the 2nd and 3rd author, (c) journal titles will be underlined or bolded but not put italics as is the normal AIAA format, and (d) the full publication year will be provided including day and month where available (the rationale for this decision is that the day and month could serve as a discriminator in reviewing the short view results)

Assisting the User Issues:

In terms of helping the user work through the system the following issues were discussed:

• A tips page is needed to give users information about how to perform a search.
• The results page will also need a set of help screens designed to explain the format of the results page (short and long view) and the meaning of the terms used.
• A button will be needed on each of these screens to make the help function obvious to the users

There are some limitations to using LiveLink that affect the way that results can be displayed. These include:

• The formatting of citations referenced by an article cannot be controlled (ie, can't underline title, etc.)
• The max number of citations for the short view is controlled by a master configuration file for the database and cannot be reset by the user. We discussed the number of hits that should appear on each page with the social science team recommending 25 per page.
• There are limitations of headings that can be used on the short and long results page because LiveLink adds labels to the top of these pages. This is an issue for the display of the search terms.