The growth and diversity of electronic journals (e-journals) in the past five years had led many to predict the extinction of print journals and that a new paradigm is sweeping scholarship. Some others however, believe that future electronic scholarly journals will be different from their print antecedents and that both will fill a different niche, and will be necessary for the growth of knowledge. This paper considers the future of e-journals in the light of the use and perception of graduate student end-users, and their expectations of future e-journals. A segment of the results from a recent user study that present significant implications for the design of future e-journals are reported. The results show a significantly high acceptance of e-journals by this category of users. Generally, e-journals are expected to be different from print journals, with novel forms of functionality not possible in their print counterparts.
Providing enhanced access and added-value to electronic documents (e-documents) will require interfaces that effectively mediate between the information-seeking needs of the users and the information that the e-document has to offer. A proposed information environment (PIE) to support effective and creative use of e-documents to fulfil user's various information tasks and needs is presented. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive tools that can be flexibly combined, the PIE allows users to apply multiple novel ways to intuitively query and navigate information in an e-document. The querying and browsing processes in the PIE are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques. Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for information gathering and organising, based on navigable, fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich metadata and additional layers of value-adding information. This paper describes the conceptual design of the PIE and uses a representative scenario to show how the PIE is likely to be used for interacting with electronic journals (e-journals) and the ability of the proposed environment to provide enhanced user interaction and value-adding.
In this paper, we present a proposed information environment (PROPIE) for enhanced interaction and value‐adding of electronic documents (e‐documents). The design of PROPIE was based on a thorough user needs and requirements assessment in interacting with information through well‐documented findings, and a focus group with twelve participants to elicit features that were deemed desirable in future interactions. The design was also based on an earlier work which reviewed the advancements in various user interface (UI) technologies, visualisation and interactive techniques, and a consideration of novel information structuring and organisation techniques that pose important implications for the design of more advanced UIs. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive tools that can be flexibly combined, PROPIE allows users to apply multiple novel ways to query intuitively and navigate information in an e‐document. The querying and browsing processes in PROPIE are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques. Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for information gathering and organising, based on navigable, fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich metadata and additional layers of value‐adding information. A set of interface mock‐ups was developed to demonstrate the potential of the environment in supporting the design of a new generation of electronic journals (e‐journals). We report here empirical results from a study conducted to obtain representative users‘ feedback with regard to using PROPIE for interacting with e‐journals. Twenty‐two participants from a variety of academic backgrounds participated in the evaluation. Overall, PROPIE was found to have the potential both for enhancing the user’s interaction with information captured within e‐journals and for adding value to e‐documents in various ways.
This paper investigates the potentialities of a proposed information environment (PROPIE) for user interaction and value-adding of electronic documents (e-documents). The design of PROPIE was based on a thorough review of user needs and requirements in interacting with information through well-documented findings, and a focus group with twelve participants to identify features that were deemed desirable in future interactions. The design was also based on a review of developments in various user interface (UI) technologies, visualization and interactive techniques, and a consideration of new forms of information structuring and organization that pose important implications for the design of more advanced UIs. To this end, a set of interface mockups was developed to demonstrate the potential of the environment in supporting the design of a new generation of electronic journals (e-journals). An empirical evaluation of various aspects of the environment was conducted to obtain representative users' feedback with regard to interacting with e-journals. Twenty two participants from a variety of academic background took part in the evaluation. This paper reports the results which have general implications for the design of e-documents.
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