Personal and group spaces: Integrating resources for users of digital libraries
J. Alfredo Sánchez, Carlos Proal, Dámaris Pérez, Ana R. Carballo · 2001
This paper presents an approach to integrate highly diverse resources available in digital libraries via personalizable interfaces and virtual collaboration areas. Digital libraries comprise vast digital repositories and a wide range of services, user environments and interfaces, all intended to support learning and collaborative research activities. We are developing a distributed digital library for which services and interfaces include, for example, mobile agents for federated information retrieval, recommendation agents, 3D visualization aids, and access to digital documents that support specific courses and projects. The diversity of these interfaces, plus the volume and dynamism of the digital library's underlying collections, result in a complexity that has the potential to make the digital library unwieldy for the user. In order to assist users in dealing with this complexity, we have designed environments, termed personal and group spaces, which provide users with means to access and control all available resources in a uniform fashion from a single vantage point. We discuss our design and development experiences as well as initial usage results. Keywords: personalized interfaces, collaborative interfaces, digital libraries, personal spaces, group spaces, agents. 1.