James Blustein
Mona Noor
ABSTRACT
We examine basic issues of glossary tools as part of a suite of annotational tools to help users make meaning from documents from unfamiliar realms of discourse. We specifically evaluated the performance of glossary tools for reading medical information about common diseases by users with no formal medical education.
We developed both automatic and an editable glossary tools. Both of them extracted definitions from the text of articles. Only the editable glossary tool allowed users to add delete and change entries.
Both tools were evaluated to find out how useful they were to users reading technical articles online. The analytical results showed that user performance improved without increasing total reading time. The glossary tools were effective and pleasing to users at no decrease in efficiency. This experiment points the way for longer-term studies with adaptable tools particularly to help users unfamiliar with technical documents. We also discuss the rôle of glossaries as part of a suite of annotational tools to help users make personal (and therefore meaningful) hypertextual document collections.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
Personal Glossaries on the WWW: An Exploratory Study (Hypertext)
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Digital Library
- James Blustein. Automatically generated hypertext versions of scholarly articles and their evaluation. In K. M. Anderson ed. Proc. Hypertext '00 pp. 201--210. ACM Press 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
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- Jan Olsen. Electronic Journal Literature: Implications for Scholars. Mecklermedia 1994. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jean Tague-Sutcliffe. Measuring Information: An Information Services Perspective. Library and Information Science Series. Academic Press 1995.Google Scholar
- Patricia Wright. Cognitive overheads and prostheses: Some issues in evaluating hypertexts. In Proc. Hypertext '91 pp. 1--12. ACM Press 1991. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Patricia Wright. To jump or not to jump: Strategy selection while reading electronic texts. In C. McKnight A. Dillon and J. Richardson editors Hypertext: A Psychological Perspective. Ellis Horwood 1993.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Personal glossaries on the WWW: an exploratory study
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