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Toward Functional Requirements for the Digital Library (based on focus group interviews with faculty and students)

20 December, 1994 - Draft

* = most important

• *--DL should allow the user to follow citation links forward and backwards (preferably to full documents; otherwise to location information)
• *--DL should include an online meta-thesaurus that users can search and browse. The meta-thesaurus should integrated existing thesaurae across disciplines. It should also allow users to incorporate their own terms and edit existing terms. The thesaurus should allow users to type in a few letters of a word and see corresponding terms, should suggest or reference alternatives to users' terms. Users should be able to view no. and type of documents associated with terms and link automatically from thesaurus terms to documents.
• --DL should include an acronym list to help users identify and search for terms.
• --Users should be allowed to save a record of their searches and what each search retrieved.
• *--Users should be able to search and view individual components of a document (e.g., author/title, abstract, figures, references) in a dynamic manner, specifying for each search which elements should be searched and which displayed.
• *--Users should be able to customize their interfaces so that search options, procedures are presented in the manner they like best.
• --Users should be able to view an overview description of the contents of the testbed.
• *--Display of full documents should mimic the look and feel of the article's print version in both page layout and page "flipping" (i.e., users should be able to view multiple pages at once and in quick succession)
• *--Users should be able to design and launch their own user profiles for any particular search session, defining what they want and how they want to get it.
• *--Users should be able to move easily from query to results and back, rather than moving in the linear fashion common in online systems today, revising a query upon viewing results without having to lose sight of the results or start a query over.
• *--Users should be able to easily create personal electronic article collections as a subset of the DL, manipulate and share that collection.
• --Users should be able to define and set their own access points for searching personal collections derived from the DL
• --DL should allow on-screen highlighting, bookmarking to help in reading full articles.
• --Users should have access to DL from home and office.
• --DL should allow printing of full documents
• *--Users should be able to jump to and view individual document components. They should be able to skim, open, or skip individual document components.
• --DL should facilitate colleage networks: allow users to view list of contact info for authors, construct mailing list of colleagues to send documents to.
• *--DL should provide complete and intuitive online help: help balloons, full documentation, help with basic computing, gripe button, sample searches.
• --DL should allow users to make own links to commonly used external network resources (e.g., pre-print databases, listservs)
• --Search parameters should include physical location of material not available online
• --DL should facilitate browsing at shelf, ToC, and article levels: users need overview and zoom capabilities.
• *--Interface should resemble a "natural topography" of the information landscape... with a physical layout, dynamically defined (topic, material type, author, etc.)
• *--DL should allow serendipitous discovery of "other books on the shelf," "other articles in the journal." Perhaps set browse mode as a purposeful search option: by call no., journal title, etc.