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Killer
Resource! The Human-Computer
Interaction Bibliography
You mean besides sublimating my compulsive information organization disorder? The HCIBIB is about 10 years old, and I just wrote a retrospective for ACM interactions and discussed some reasons for doing it all to the local SIGCHI chapter: The basic idea was to get bibliographic info online in some useful format. Besides being a nice artifact for my own research on information retrieval, it could be useful to the whole field. Ten years ago, I was further motivated by some related activities that did not meet my needs (or others, I thought): Originally, I though that it would be possible to get many people, maybe thousands, to do a little work and build a database. I found that people were harder to coordinate than I expected, so eventually, I got about 150 people to do more than a little work (average 5-10 hours) to get materials online and validated for accuracy. Two years ago, while moving to a new site, I decided to get its own domain so that it could have a permanent address for the data and search service. From then on, I have tried to make the HCIBIB the best place to go for high-quality bibliographic information on HCI. Shortly after CHI 98, I decided that internet resources could be fit into the HCIBIB. I had been generating a variety of pages on the SIGCHI site from little databases, so I decided to generate most of the link pages on the SIGCHI site from a file of internet resources. I just checked and there are 882 links in the internet file. I also generate the link page for the SIGCAPH site (Physically Handicapped): The HCIBIB is one of the first sites to register as Bobby 3.1 accessible:
Mainly bibliographic records of publications (about 18,500), most with abstracts, and over 4000 with links to full text (some only available by subscription), which makes it a sort of digital library on HCI. There are records on 430 HCI books, 265 with tables of contents, 99 with links to more information (e.g., the publisher page for the book). The newest resource is the internet file, with 882 records today (918 links, 305 email addresses). The categories are shown on the HCIBIB page: These link pages are generated from the database.
I try not to play favorites. What is cool, I think, is the integration and reuse of information. An article contains links to internet records on its publisher, links to the journal or conference in which the article appeared. Book ISBNs are converted to hotlinks to amazon.com (proceeds are donated to the local SIGCHI chapter). The internet resources include some carefully crafted searches on the HCIBIB. So, you can search for a search on CSCW, or hypertext, or ... it hurts to think about it ... information retrieval (i.e., search for a search on search). The HCIBIB site always features a query of general interest; this month it's a search for online glossaries, and previous months have featured recent books, recent conferences, etc. I use the data to generate a variety of summaries: top authors in the field, top publishers of HCI books, number of records by year, and a few others. The HCIBIB home page design is in response to a lot of user mail. Having to use the glimpse search engine for various reasons, and knowing from my work that people need help formulating queries, I started the ask an expert (me) service, which gave me some insights into what people are looking for. Well, about a quarter of all requests were for a definition of HCI, so I linked to the SIGCHI CDG report: Another quarter were requests for books on HCI in general, so I added a link to my list of recommended readings: Since adding the section called "Learn about HCI", I get about half the requests for search help. I end up learning a lot about how to provide what people are looking for.
The HCIBIB is supposed to be THE place to search for HCI info. One of its strengths is that it allows people to search across many publication types: journals, conferences, books, and internet resources, to name the most common. Certainly researchers in HCI can benefit from the HCIBIB. Most of the records are of technical publications from major HCI journals and conferences. However, with a free service, I always fear researchers will start AND STOP with the HCIBIB and not look for other resources. While there is no general way to focus a search on practical material, searches can be limited to internet resources or books, which tend to be more practical. Some queries do get some practical technical information, for example, a search of internet resources for ":columns" gets 17 online columns (including two from WebWord). Maybe that will be the featured query next month. Gary Perlman, director@hcibib.org
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