Cognitive overheads and prostheses: some issues in evaluating hypertexts
HYPERTEXT '91 Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext
Electronic journal literature: implications for scholars
Electronic journal literature: implications for scholars
Annotation: from paper books to the digital library
DL '97 Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Digital libraries
Automatically generated hypertext versions of scholarly articles and their evaluation
HYPERTEXT '00 Proceedings of the eleventh ACM on Hypertext and hypermedia
A social approach to authoring media annotations
Proceedings of the 10th ACM symposium on Document engineering
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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.