The Second Alexandria Design Review

The second ADR, is being held February 19-21, 1997 in Santa Barbara, under conditions that differ significantly from those of the first ADR. First, the current Web-based Testbed has much greater functionality than the Rapid Prototype. Second, the efforts of the User Evaluation Team have generated a great deal of knowledge concerning requirements. Third, the catalog and interface designs under major revision. For these reasons, it will be possible to move beyond the user requirements focus of the first meeting, and discuss the system design and implementation in much greater depth at the upcoming meeting.

In particular, the Project is now in a position to form a ``permanent'' Design Review Panel that will function for the duration of the Project. Invitations to serve on the ADR Panel were sent to librarians, particularly map librarians, managers of geospatial operations, and environmental information centers, information system software developers, and educators. Representatives from the other DLI Projects and from the funding agencies were also invited to participate. More than 40 people have accepted our invitation to serve and will come to the February meeting. Participants include all three target groups, with educators, librarians and earth and space scientists attending.

The main goal of the second ADR is to collect comments and recommendations from advisors who can potentially benefit from the ADR Project and who can contribute needed expertise to the ongoing design and development of the digital library. Results will be captured in a report which will be distributed to the Design Review Panel members and which will serve as a guideline document to the ADL staff. Evaluation of the meeting will be used to plan the next meeting of the ADR Panel early in 1998.

The themes of the meeting are

1. searching and browsing, with an emphasis on the Catalog, Gazetteer, and Map Browser system functions, in addition to determining from each target group the manner in which the needs for functionality vary according to disciplinary groups;
2. content and processing, with an emphasis on plans for increasing ADL collections, and the associated issues of content selection, potential for external groups to enter data into ADL, and options for distributing the ADL catalog;
3. interface and navigation, with a focus on on the newly formed Interface Design Team work, and alternate metaphors for ADL interface design.

The meeting will start with a status report of the ADL Project. This will be followed by focusing discussion on three design topics: (1) Search, Browse, and Retrieval Functionality, (2) the Content of the ADL and Processing Functionality, and (3) Interface Design. Each topic will be introduced by an overview of the issues from ADL's point-of-view. The Panel will then discuss the topic in small groups (small enough for everyone to have a say). These sessions will forward recommendations and comments to a plenary session on the topic where the recommendations from the Panel as a whole can be identified.

Much work has gone into the preparation for the meeting. An online registration web page is in place where Panel members describe themselves and respond to three questions: (1) description of their work, (2) their use of geospatial information, and (3) their view of ADL. This information is available to the Panel members and ADL personnel. The registration process will also allow us to track individual logs of interaction with ADL for the Panel members and thus have for the first time the ability to accumulate and analyze the patterns of use on an individual, multi-session basis. Panel members will be invited to beta test new interfaces as they are ready for testing/comment.

Panel members were also asked to evaluate the user requirement statements that resulted from the Target User Group activities before they come to the meeting in February. A set of online evaluation forms were implemented where Panel members could easily indicate for each statement one of the following:

Would use frequently or Very important to me
Would use occasionally or Important to me
Don't know if I would use it or Don't know how important
Would use infrequently or Not important to me
Don't understand the statement
The average, median, mode and range of the evaluation responses will be part of the information that the Panelists will have to provide background for their discussions. A report of the recommendations and discussions from the second ADL Design Review will be developed by ADL staff, edited by Panel members, and then made available as an HTML document through the ADL web page. This report will become a set of design recommendations that will guide ADL system and interface design.