Summary of Workshop on Document Search Interface Design at the JCDL'02
Javed Mostafa
Yngve Associate Professor of Information Science
Associate Professor of Informatics
Indiana University, Bloomington

On July 18th, 2002 the First Workshop on Document Search Interface Design andIntelligent Access took place at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Portland,Oregon. Seven papers were selected for presentation, and about 20 people were inattendance. The papers presented at the workshop can be grouped under three broad
categories: 1) enhanced interaction and interface support, 2) domain-centric analysis ofsearch needs, and 3) behavioral analysis of search and user interaction.
French et al. presented a paper that falls under the first category. Their proposal is forsupporting enhanced searching by allowing users to specify and refine queries based on
multiple viewpoints. Viewpoints are different contexts of the same collection thatemphasize different aspects of the content. In the same category was a paper by Wu et al.
concentrating on a specific interface design feature, namely Table of Content view ofcollections, which can be used to organize large hit sets into hierarchical displays forlocating desired information quickly and more accurately. Harper and Muresan's paper
focused on interaction and interface support for increasing query accuracy through amediation step. The mediation step takes advantage of existing specialized collections,allows users to browse topical structures in these collections, and generates refinedqueries by applying statistical language modeling.
By considering "design" as a special domain and analyzing the information support
demands from this context, Harper produced a set of specific functional requirements.
Harper convincingly argued that search must be viewed from the context of domainoriented tasks and activities and systems must be designed that seamlessly integrate
search into support for other key tasks and activities. Qin and Finneran pointed out theimportance of the relationship between representation and search functions by analyzing
the major metadata standards used in the educational domain and the constraints these
representations place on searching. Qin and Finneran proposed an ontologicalrepresentation that can capture component level semantics in a more in-depth manner andthus has the potential to improve navigation and retrieval of learning objects.
Toms claimed that advances in search interfaces have been slow due to lack ofconsideration of key "sub-tasks" users engage in during searching. She presented a list of
16 sub-tasks abstracted from observation of typical search tasks performed by 48
participants using a modified Google interface. Kelly and Belkin defined context ofsearch more broadly than an information need event - as a problematic situation that isinfluenced by various attributes including topic familiarity, topic persistence, task
endurance, and problem solving stage. In their paper they described the background andmethodology of a longitudinal study that aims to more clearly characterize the attributes

of user's problematic situation and identify their relationship to common search and use
behaviors such as book-marking, viewing, scrolling, and printing.
The main objective of the workshop was to raise awareness and improve understandingof theories and models of interaction and new interface design approaches. In this regard
the workshop can be considered a success as it attracted high quality papers as well as
researchers and developers conducting cutting edge work in the field. In collaboration
with the main organizer of the information visualization workshop, Katy Borner, we are
already planning the 2nd workshop to be held in next year's JCDL. The informationvisualization workshop will be merged with the search interface workshop, and it istentatively titled: Information Retrieval & Navigation Interfaces. Related URLs to thesearch interface workshop and the visualization workshop are provided below:
Mongrel Project (Kelly and Belkin): http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/mongrel
Laboratory of Applied Informatics Research: http://lair.indiana.edu
2nd Workshop on Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries:
http://vw.indiana.edu/visual02/jcdl.html
1st Workshop on Document Search Interface Design in Large Collections:
http://xtasy.slis.indiana.edu/jcdlui/uiws.html

The workshop committee was:
Robin Burke, California State University, Fullerton
James French, University of Virginia, Charlottsville
Javed Mostafa, Indiana University, Bloomington (Chair)
Kiduk Yang, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
This article was previously published in the D-LIB magazine, 8(9), Sep. 2002.