Abstract

The widespread acceptance of digital library will depend, to a large extent, on the ease-of-use and appeal of the user interface. Hence, the development of a versatile and friendly user interface for digital library becomes indispensable and this has been the objective of this thesis. A pilot project on digital library was undertaken jointly by the four universities in Montreal. At Concordia University we undertook the responsibility for developing a User Interface. The sample digital library consists of 9000 photographs of architectural images and associated texts. The user interface design deals with providing a uniform interface for texts and images. It makes use of a simple conceptual model that is well suited for digital libraries, and provides a direct manipulation interface with affordances that are appropriate to a "distributed digital library". The biggest challenge in a distributed digital library will be to balance between recall and precision to a level satisfactory to the user. Most searches on digital library often provide a large number of hits and thus overloading the user with information. To overcome the problem of information overloading, in this thesis, we have investigated collaboration in information retrieval. Collaboration among multiple users stem from reusing and sharing information gathered by one with others. Software agents called user interface agents are expected to assist users in collaboration and filtering. A protocol is proposed for cooperation and inter-operation between multiple user interface agents. The analysis shows that conflicts can arise during collaboration and they can be resolved using negotiation.