Managing personal documents with a digital library

Abstract

This paper presents a desktop system for managing personal documents. The documents can be of many types—text, spreadsheets, images, multimedia—and are organized in a personal “digital library”. The interface supports browsing over a wide variety of document metadata, as well as full-text searching. This extensive browsing facility addresses a significant flaw in digital library and file management software, both of which typically provide less support for browsing than for searching, and support relatively inflexible browsing methods. Three separate usability studies of a prototype—an expert evaluation, a learnability evaluation, and a diary study—were conducted to suggest design refinements, which were then incorporated into the final system.