Charles-Antoine Julien

Charles-Antoine Julien, Banafsheh Asadi, Jesse David Dinneen et al.

Controlled topical vocabularies (CVs) are built into information systems to aid browsing and retrieval of items that may be unfamiliar, but it is unclear how this feature should be integrated with standard keyword searching. Few systems or scholarly prototypes have attempted this, and none have used the most widely used CV, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which organizes monograph collections in academic libraries throughout the world. This paper describes a working prototype of a Web application that concurrently allows topic exploration using an outline tree view of the LCSH hierarchy and natural language keyword searching of a real-world Science and Engineering bibliographic collection. Pilot testing shows the system is functional, and work to fit the complex LCSH structure into a usable hierarchy is ongoing. This study contributes to knowledge of the practical design decisions required when developing linked interactions between topical hierarchy browsing and natural language searching, which promise to facilitate information discovery and exploration.

Jesse David Dinneen, Charles-Antoine Julien

Computer users spend time every day interacting with digital files and folders, including downloading, moving, naming, navigating to, searching for, sharing, and deleting them. Such file management has been the focus of many studies across various fields, but has not been explicitly acknowledged nor made the focus of dedicated review. In this article we present the first dedicated review of this topic and its research, synthesizing more than 230 publications from various research domains to establish what is known and what remains to be investigated, particularly by examining the common motivations, methods, and findings evinced by the previously furcate body of work. We find three typical research motivations in the literature reviewed: understanding how and why users store, organize, retrieve, and share files and folders, understanding factors that determine their behavior, and attempting to improve the user experience through novel interfaces and information services. Relevant conceptual frameworks and approaches to designing and testing systems are described, and open research challenges and the significance for other research areas are discussed. We conclude that file management is a ubiquitous, challenging, and relatively unsupported activity that invites and has received attention from several disciplines and has broad importance for topics across information science.