1	Library of Congress Case INLS 357
2	Context 1995 LoC initiated the NDL 1995 2 year contract with UMD to collaborate on interface development University team to drive near-term design through prototypes, LoC team to implement within current constraints.
3	LoC ACCESS Team and Process 1. Design team: analysts, programmers, librarians, and interface designers. 2. Strong perspective based on short courses occasional users, touch screen, discrete and continuous buttons 3. Regular meetings with brainstorming encouraged 4. Prototype subtasks assigned 5. Preliminary designs critiqued 6. Revision and continued critique 7. User testing 8. Revision 9. Continued extension
4	LC NDL Project Plan 1. Needs Assessment Current Users (RR librarians, patrons, online) Potential Users (scholars, teachers/SLMS, public) 2. Structure Analysis Current Content & Organization (e.g., collection/item record) Future Content & Organization 3. Develop feature space (collect, analyze exemplars) 4. Agree on first principles, metaphor, outline guidelines 5. Sketch designs, group critique 6. Prototypes, “discount” user tests (3 iterations planned) 7. Final prototype(s) and extended user tests 8. Reflection and evaluation of process, final guidelines
5	Needs Assessment 9 Reading Rooms 3 part structured interview (in teams) Content, users, strategies Yielded lists of special interface challenges Day care center questionnaire Key issues Novelty (DLs were new) Diversity in experience (domain, technology) Diversity in platforms Volume, diversity, formats, granularities of materials (digital+analog, finding aids+collections+primary, lack of common metadata)
6	Design Goals Minimize disorientation by reducing navigation (e.g., minimize scrolling and jumping, flattening hierarchy) and anchoring users in a consistent context; Provide primary information at the earliest point in the interaction as possible; Support rapid relevance decisions through overviews and previews.
7	Technical Decisions Use dynamic query interactions To cope with limitations of HTML display and cgi interaction, use Java and JavaScript To cope with metadata issues, divide into across collection browser and within collection browser (overview and preview distinctions)
8	Visualizations for Overviews and Previews Aim for user-manipulable VIEWS rather than alchemy Overviews are constructed from, and represent COLLECTIONS Previews are extracted from and are surrogates for OBJECTS Dynamic query approach with starfield and barfield displays Visualization widgets are embedded in larger user tasks
9	Entry Mockup #1
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17	Gathering tool to create personal collections
18	Video browser with animated display of key frames
19	Thumbnail Page Browser
20	Image Browser-Collector
21	References http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/ndl/ Marchionini, G., Plaisant, C., Komlodi, A. (May 1996) User needs assessment for the Library of Congress National Digital Library, CS-TR-3640, CAR-TR-829, CLIS-96-01. Marchionini, G., Plaisant, C., & Komlodi, A. (1998). Interfaces and tools for the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. Information Processing & Management, 34(5), 535-555. Nation, D. Plaisant, C., Marchionini, G., & Komlodi, A. (1997). Visualizing websites using a hierarchical table of contents browser: WebTOC. In Proceedings of Designing for the Web: Practices and Reflections (3rd Conference on Human factors and the Web, Denver, June 12, 1997). Plaisant, C., Marchionini, G., Bruns, T., Komlodi, A., & Campbell, L. (1997). Bringing treasures to the surface: Iterative design for the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. ACM CHI ‘97 Conference. (Atlanta, March 22-27, 1997), p. 518-525. Marchionini, G., Plaisant, C., & Komlodi, A. (forthcoming). The people in digital libraries: Multifaceted approaches to assessing needs and impact. In A. Bishop, B. Buttenfield, & N. VanHouse (Eds.) Digital library use: Social practice in design and evaluation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.