Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Hyperlinking between Printed and Digital
Documents
Knowledge workers frequently work with a set of interwoven documents, where in-
formation is distributed across several documents, e.g. in a printed lecture script, in
some additional Web pages and in a personal notebook. In such interwoven docu-
ments, references are an important means that help the user in integrating this in-
formation. The following scenarios give some examples of how references support
tasks in our application domain:
Scenario 12 (Integrating information from multiple documents)
In addition to
some lectures, Sally attends a seminar. Her task is to compose a term paper on a
specific topic. This requires mainly autonomous, self-directed work. The instructor
indicates a few pointers to the literature. Based on these, she has to find further
literature and precise the subject and the formulation of the questions. She searches
literature in libraries, borrows books and photocopies some journal articles. She
also looks for information on the Web and prints Web pages and PDF documents in
order to have them available on paper. Initially this is a rather chaotic and unstruc-
tured collection of various documents. In order to structure the collection, Sally
connects related documents by hyperlinks. A graphical overview on all documents
and the hyperlinks between them is automatically created by CoScribe.
Scenario 13 (Excerpting)
Excerpting is an important scientific method for reading
books and summarizing their contents in a structured way. An excerpt is a short
summary of the most important aspects of an existing text. This can also include
own thoughts of the reader, can set the text into a larger context and can establish
relations with previously acquired knowledge. While reading a text, Sally makes
notes on a separate document, e.g. on a paper notebook. She adds references to the
original text to indicate the passage a note refers to. This allows her to easily find
the original passage at a subsequent point in time.
Traditional handwritten references are difficult to follow, since the target doc-
ument must be manually searched. This is particularly hard with cross-media hy-
perlinks. Moreover, users cannot easily share their references with co-workers. And
even if references of co-workers are shared, it is not easy to understand their mean-
ing because users have highly individual practices of referencing.
