How should users access the content of digital books?

I report briefly on some of my own work in each of these areas and elucidate some of the questions that this research has raised. Then I propose as a research agenda the development of a digital library environment containing a suite of inter-related tools specifically designed to facilitate non-sequential access to portions of full-text books and other relatively long documents. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.7 Information Systems, INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL, Digital Libraries General Terms Human Factors Keywords Electronic books Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association, declared that "massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility." (Gorman 2004). His criticism was based on the claim that (scholarly) non-reference books must be read sequentially, from end to end. "A snippet from Page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was now wort...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Nina Wacholder
• Keywords: Books Michael Gorman, CIKM 2008, Digital Library Environment, Electronic Books, Information Management