Reading and Interactivity in the Digital Library: Creating an experience that transcends paper

Abstract

Recently I read two articles in the Communications of the ACM that made parallel, if somewhat alarming, claims. The first, from Peter Neumann’s column, “Inside Risks, ” observed that “we seem to have evolved into a mentality of ‘If it’s not on the Internet, it doesn’t exist.’ ” He also notes that the Web duplicates very little of the material we might find in traditional institutions like public libraries [24]. The second article, by Leah Graham and Panagiotis Takis Mataxas, points to experimental evidence that although most of today’s students do research exclusively on the Internet, very few of them double-check the information that they find, or – better yet – locate multiple independent sources to corroborate what they’ve learned from a single source [6]. From my point of view, these articles point to two important research questions. First, and most fundamentally, much of what we read when we research a topic now arrives in digital form; how can we ensure that people are able to read it when and where they retrieve it? The second, and more provocative of the two questions is: How will people interact and work with these digital materials in a