Discusses usability as an interface design concept to improve information retrieval on the World Wide Web. Highlights include criteria for a usable Web site; usability testing; usability resources on the Web; and a sidebar that gives an example of usability testing by Hewlett-Packard. (LRW)

Considers some of the most fundamental problems in music information retrieval, challenging the common assumption that searching on pitch alone is likely to be satisfactory for all purposes. Discusses special issues related to polyphonic music, user-interface issues, and the notion of relevance for music information retrieval. (Contains 52…

Describes a user interface that provides global visualizations of large document sets to help users formulate the query that corresponds to their information needs. Highlights include concept hierarchies that users can browse to specify and refine information needs; knowledge discovery in databases and texts; and multidimensional modeling.…

Describes the implementation of FromTo-CLIR, a Web-based natural-language interface for cross-language information retrieval that was tested with Korean and Japanese. Proposes a method that uses a semantic category tree and collocation to resolve the ambiguity of query translation. (Author/LRW)

Today's world demands an expansive search environment. The universe of information resources is immense and is growing rapidly. The content needed for research and scholarship is dispersed among publishers, aggregators, repositories, library catalogs, e-print servers, and servers throughout the Web. Users do not want to jump from one interface to…

This article describes the survey of the usability of a novel content-based video retrieval system. This system combines video streaming and an electronic bulletin board system (BBS). Comments submitted to the BBS are used to index video data. Following the development of the prototype system an experimental survey with ten subjects was performed.…

Discussion of search strategy in information retrieval by end users focuses on the role played by strategic reasoning and design principles for user interfaces. Highlights include strategic help based on collaborative coaching; a conceptual model for strategic help; and a prototype knowledge-based system named FIRE. (Author/LRW)

This study evaluates the usability of the Journal Finder integrated search interface, developed at the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This interface provides electronic access to publications including journals, newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. This study was conducted to determine how intuitive and…

Describes a study that investigated users' perceptions of ease of use versus user control in Web-based online information retrieval (IR) systems. Discusses desired features and functionalities as well as desired interface structures that support both ease of use and user control. (Author/LRW)

Discusses software design issues for Okapi, an information retrieval system that incorporates both search engine and user interface and supports weighted searching, relevance feedback, and query expansion. The basic search system, adjacency searching, and moving toward a distributed system are discussed. (Author/LRW)

Compares empirical results from three experiments using Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) data and search topics that involved three different user interfaces. Results show that marking Boolean queries on text, which encourages browsing, and hypertext interfaces to text retrieval systems can benefit recall and can also benefit novice users.…

Presents a framework for interface design that provides people with flexible control over different views for an information space, particularly on the World Wide Web. The agileviews framework defines overviews, previews, reviews, peripheral views, and shared views that help people make decisions about where they should focus attention during…

Statistical clustering is critical in designing scalable image retrieval systems. This paper presents a scalable algorithm for indexing and retrieving images based on region segmentation. The method uses statistical clustering on region features and IRM (Integrated Region Matching), a measure developed to evaluate overall similarity between images…

Describes a prototype system for software documentation management called SLEUTH (Software Literacy Enhancing Usefulness to Humans) being developed at the University of Virginia. Highlights include information retrieval techniques, hypertext links that are installed automatically, a WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) search engine, user…

Focuses on the user and human-computer interaction aspects of the research based on the Okapi text retrieval system. Three experiments implementing different approaches to query expansion are described, including the use of graphical user interfaces with different windowing techniques. (Author/LRW)