A report of the Second Alexandria Design Review Panel on February 19-21, 1997 was written and posted on the ADL internal web page. The workshop was to review user requirements for the Alexandria Digital Library and to discuss plans for testbed development and research progress in the coming eighteen months. The panel recognized that the challenge to build an operational digital library testbed is improved by the research accomplishments of the ADL team and that it is important to recognize that some research questions cannot be addressed in the absence of an operational testbed. This balance of emphasis will continue to be a concern through the rest of the project.
Thirty-two representatives from the public sector, private sector, and academia came from the U.S. and one from Canada for two-and-a-half days to participate in plenary and small group discussions, software demonstrations, and informal discourse.
In preparation for the meeting, the Steering Committee agreed upon a set of objectives to guide the content of the agenda. A three-part focus was established to address issues of search, browse, and retrieval; content and processing; and interface and navigation. These three areas encompass a number of the more difficult problems to be resolved immediately. Their selection was based primarily upon feedback gained in focus groups, survey questionnaires, and videotaped or recorded interactions with actual and potential digital library patrons over the first two years of the Alexandria Project. Many specific topics were discussed including ways for users to view the contents of the library (an overview of the holdings), giving the user a "road map" of the services of the library, visualization (presentation) of search results, support for iterative search processes, and customization of the user interface.
From the wide range of comments and recommendations contributed by the Panelists that are detailed in the report, some strong themes can be identified. First, the Panel is supportive of the efforts of the research teams working at Santa Barbara and at Colorado. Panelists and funding agency representatives agreed that keeping a careful balance between developing an operational digital library and contributing to theoretical and applied research is necessary. The importance of the content of the library was strongly supported, as were the enabling technologies for distributed ingesting of data with attention to the representation of data provenance and verification. Collection development criteria were discussed at length, with emphasis on focusing on particular geographic areas and collecting all forms of georeferenced information about that place. Panelists recommended that ADL develop enabling technologies and specifications for connecting local collections to ADL, with distributed searching capability.
In connection with ADL user interface design, the implementation of user profiles was discussed with ideas for multiple profiles per person and for the way in which the profiles could influence the interface presentation and conduct of the search. Support for a method of providing "something with a heartbeat" to be available to assist in the use of ADL was expressed in several ways, with the related recommendation that ADL aim to create a professional tool for information specialists as well as for other user communities. A discussion of measures of success for ADL focused on grounding those measures in the user's work environment and information needs.
ADL Staff identified four areas in which the Design Review has had an immediate impact: (1) collection development strategy, (2) user profile strategy, (3) development of a strategy to provide human support to digital library users, and (4) the design of the new interface.
The overall thread that runs through the recommendations is that ADL needs to focus better on what can be accomplished in the short time left in the current phase of the project. Most panelists reported that the format of the Workshop worked well, but they would like for it to have been more focused and they expect to see specific responses from ADL on the recommendations made.