"The Library of Congress at a Glance": Text Visualization and Reference Rooms Without Walls

IASSIST Quarterly You should “be able to see the Library of Congress at a glance” declared Ben Shneiderman, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He was one of many presenters at the Advanced Information Processing & Analysis Symposium which was held at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia between March 22nd and March 24th, 1994. The symposium was organized by the Advanced Information Processing & Analysis Steering Group which represents the intelligence community. A primary goal of this organization is to provide liaison between intelligence analysts and potential contractors. Analysts are responsible for assimilating and synthesizing information from a variety of sources and producing digests of the request in timely fashion. In effect, they face the same overwhelming flood of information that all researchers do. They need some technology which allows them to visualize the search environment at a glance, filter out irrelevant information and focus in on what is critical to their tasks. Text visualization is one of the technologie s being explored.