Reading #3

Marshall, C. C., & Bly, S. (2005). Turning the page on navigation. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries, (pp. 225-234).

This paper presents the results of two observational studies on reading and document navigation behaviors in serials. The first study documented readers interacting with paper serials, and the second study examined the same users interacting with digital serials. The authors discover that readers of magazines, journals, textbooks, anthologies do not read the entirety of these materials or read the documents from beginning to end - rather, they skim, skip, and scan the material. Navigation must support this type of use, particularly by providing some type of "lightweight navigation" and flipping capabilities. Lightweight navigation includes behaviors such as focusing in on specific sections of a page or glances back or ahead in a document. In paper form this might entail folding a newspaper so that only one or two columns of text are visible. In digital form, a reader could zoom in on a page to simulate the same effect. Flipping allows a fast visual scan of a serial. It is more problematic to provide this type of navigation in digital form, but thumbnail scrolling might be one solution. Jumping behaviors that occur during paper serial reading are much more difficult to render in digital forms. Metadata may offer comparable functionality by allowing readers to navigate to subsections of a document or to other articles in the periodical, but this type of navigation is far less fluid.