Dissertation
Towards the Design of a Hypermedia Journal
(1996)
Abstract
Information work was examined in order to identify the structure and applications needed in the redesign of an existing print document to a hypermedia journal (h-journal). The h-journal, conceptualized as a new genre of networked electronic documents, aims to support information work in the practitioner environment. Reference librarians in health sciences libraries were selected as the practitioner community and Educational Services in Health Sciences Libraries, Volume II of the series Current Practice in Health Sciences Librarianship* used as the print corpus. A content analysis of the literature and job descriptions in the domain, a field study, and document analysis of the print corpus and the products of work were some of the methods used to study work.
Information work in the health sciences library reference domain is a collaborative and interactive flow of tasks that consists of seventeen categories of activities. These ranged from the traditional activities such as reference work and teaching to newer ones such as information design and electronic publisher. Four categories of work intersected in a much richer way with the other categories of work by acting as transformers, and they are: documentation, meetings, technology alliancing, and resource use/re-use. Often these were seen as the visible productivity factors of work.
The h-journal must provide tools for the manipulation of data, rather than just for reading. Such manipulations require tools to support generic tasks such as text sorting in multiple ways, collaboration tools or groupware such as a meeting-maker, and personal tools that permit the creation of customizable databases.
The transforming of traditional print documents to a h-journal is not an easy task and is one that calls for (1) comprehensive source modeling of the wide variety of sources that are available in the library in a significantly more in-depth way than has been traditionally done by cataloging or indexing practices, and (2) transformation of linear text to hypermedia by a team of authors that includes graphic artists and computer programmers besides the usual ones.
Keywords
- Library Science,
- Information Science
Disciplines
Publication Date
1996
Degree
Ph.D.
Department
Library and Information Science
Advisors
Smith, Linda C.
Comments
Copyright 1996 Coleman, Anita Sundaram
Citation Information
Anita S. Coleman. "Towards the Design of a Hypermedia Journal" (1996) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/anita-coleman/96/