Interaction design for shared World-Wide Web annotations
CHI '95 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Recommending and evaluating choices in a virtual community of use
CHI '95 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Pointing the way: active collaborative filtering
CHI '95 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Social information filtering: algorithms for automating “word of mouth”
CHI '95 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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At the Digital Libraries conference in Texas in 1994 we presented a paper describing an ethnographic study of information access in a customer support organization [1]. That study revealed the highly collaborative nature of information filtering and retrieval. In particular, support analysts relied on each other to fill in anecdotal and experiential information missing from written documentation and reason through that information to solve customer problems. Colleagues also routinely shared references to relevant sources of information. This behavior is very similar to what we have observed informally in which people will spontaneously share references to interesting documents with friends and colleagues. In fact, we found that workgroups often include at least one person who is especially skilled at browsing through large amounts of often diverse information and then making his or her findings available to others generally with some commentary on its relevance and/or intrinsic value. Based on these data and observations we developed a system in Lotus Notes to let people share references to on-line documents. The system automatically encoded contextual information such as the name of the document, its date and its source along with the hypertext link, and provided space for the person to add comments of any length [3]. The resulting "pointer" could be sent to colleagues in email or saved in a Notes database as a personal bookmark. These pointers were more useful than just sending doc links because the recipient would get some context that would help him/her decide whether to follow the link to the document. We also enhanced the basic doc link technology in Notes to automatically open or add and open the referenced database if the user did not have that database on their workspace. This enhancement meant that location and availability of the database was transparent to the user.