Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
User Interfaces for the
Library of Congress National Digital Library

Project related information

Library of Congress sites:

• Library of Congress home pages
  LC American Memory - Cross-collection searching
  National Digital Library Learning Page
  The Learning Page has been developed by the NDL Education Group and is targetted towards an audience of K-12 students and teachers but I think is certainly useful for anyone who is new to the collections and wanting to learn how to use them. Users are given pointers into possible relevant collections based on five high level categories: People, Places, Time, Topics or Events.
  (Jeff S)
  

Design examples:

• the WGBH Educational Foundation
  An example of pages designed for universal access:
  

• Trace Center
  The Trace research and Development Center provides HTML Guidelines for ensuring universal accessibility of HTML pages. This group also designed touchscreen info kiosks accessible to blind users but I'm not sure this page points to it.
  

• The Fruitcake Page.
  Clean design. Three simple choices. Use of white space around enlargeable graphics. Concise description of 1500 years of tradition in a paragraph of text.
  (Maryle A.)
  

• The Alexandria Digital Library
  The primary goal of the Alexandria Project is to design, implement, and deploy a digital library for spatially-indexed information.
  

• Hamilton College Home Page.
  Simplicity and clarity of visual design. Use of logo in varying sizes on all pages.
  (from Peter Y.)
  

• Java Language Home Page
  The White House Homepage
  Silicon Graphics Home Page
  I like these Homepages because they are simple in design, clean, and offer the user a good idea of whats behind them without alot of cluttering text to read about its purpose (atleast the first page). We could use this type of spacious design to fully convey our metaphor in detail with just graphics... Just a thought.
  (Michael B.)
  

• Atlanta Olympics Home Page.
  It is simple, yet gives a lot of choices, and it also has a text-only option. It makes good use of icons as well.
  (Beth DB)
  

• The National Cattelmen's Association.
  This is a new website, not a favorite one. What's good about it is that the www address and the web site name let's you know exactly what to expect if you visit. There's no second guessing. Maneuvering is also pretty easy --a brief web page with limited graphics, so it also loads quickly. Parts of the "main street" image can be clicked on, but other parts lead nowhere, so that is a weakness. There's also a quiz to get visitors interested in the site; the website will make contributions to a charity during the Xmas season for each correctly answered quiz. Another nice feature of the site is their use of examples to educate. The site established a fictitious cattle company ("This Ain't That Easy" aka TATE) so that visitors can get a sense of how a real company would work. I must admit I got a little tired of the Cow theme--"Cowlculations" was too much--but the statistics included were pertinent.
  (Georgia H.)
  

• Internet Public Library Reference Center
  This site has a web page that is useful, but not particularly well designed. It uses a black and white picture to depict its links with black text on top of picture. It's distracting and difficult to read, and I usually go to the text only version of the page if what I'm searching for doesn't require graphics.
  (Ernest E.)

• The Yale University Science Libraries NAVIGATOR
  This site has an "I need HELP" option. The "locate the best sources" section emulates a reference interview.
  (Floris F)

• VDOlive An example of a site with an extensive and rather fancy FAQ service...
  (Gary M.)

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  This is a clean interface with a good combination of graphics and text. It also provides good navigation and fast displays.
  (Ardie B.)

• Interface Design for Sun's WWW Site
  Layout options available to a general user.
  

• Women in Politics
  Hong Kong Transition
  Hong Kong Transition
  At our last meeting I mentioned two student group projects that might be interesting to look at as part of our LC design. Those sites are now finished and the urls follow. The Hong Kong transition site uses an increasingly popular left panel frame menu look (we will bring such a mockup for consideration next week). The Women in politics site uses link typing (distinguishing internal from external links--actually both sites attempt to do this). There are no external links for LC, but we may want to consider visual cues to distinguish different types of links within the NDL......
  (Gary M.)

Classification and search:

• Yahoo
  I like "YAHOO" because it happens to be the first search tool rich enough for me to find it useful -- I've tried many (not all) of the others and they return more 'noise' in my opinion than does YAHOO -- I tend to do simple searches and want specific items -- for example, I had heard about the St. Peterburg museum display and was able to find it quickly through YAHOO -- another time I needed Internet statistics. I like having both the subject areas and the search mechansim. And it is kept up-to-date! It's also simple but it does have a certain complexity you can access as you learn it. Not sexy maybe but effective.
  (Virgina S.)
  

• SavvySearch
  Again, I like it because it is reasonably efficient for me to use since it searches across multiple WWW search sites for me so that I don't have to go to each one. The homepage is not particularly attractive and I don't particularly like the areas it allows for customization but it is 1-stop searching.
  (Virginia S.)
  

• The University of New Brunswick Libraries' Virtual Pathfinder.
  This site has a form on its homepage that lists about 40 broad subject areas and links to guides to finding information on those subjects both at UNB and elsewhere on the web. This sort of approach might let us deal with people who want information on things like genealogy.
  (Floris F.)
  

• CyberDewey
  Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden (EELS)
  UDC (UNIVERSAL DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION)
  Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL)
  NISS Information Gateway
  OMNI, Organising Medical Networked Information
  CyberStacks(sm)
  These may be major or minor classification schemes used for monographic or serial works, or any used by established indexing and abstracting services for classifying or categorizing a selected literature. I am interested in sites that have used such schemes to organize resources in Science and Technology and such related areas as Agriculture and Medicine, as well as other disciplines.
  (Viginia S.)

• The Internet Public Library (IPL)
  (Barbara N.)

• Searching earth science data: prototype of NASA EOSDIS IMS
  This early prototype is already used by scientists trying to find datasets for their reserach. See how they have done the search form (click on the "new Search" button). They too have to deal with time, geography and parameter selection. They are currently working on a Java prototype and it will be interesting to see how it turns out...
  (Catherine P.)

Tools:

• Artists for American Indians Virtual Museum
  Virtual walkthrough example at a museum. The application used for this site is called Virtual Home Space Builder that is a product of a company called ParaGraph International.
  (Jeff B.)

• The Digital Village Exhibition
  An alternative to a 3-D walkthrough. This is a 2D walkthrough of The Art Gallery at The University of Maryland.
  (Raj L.)

• the QUIS.
  An example of survey we know how to build and we could use
  

LC working group members:
To add more items send mail to Catherine Plaisant (plaisant@cs.umd.edu)

Web Accessibility