This award provides travel support for Dr. Christine Borgman and Sandra Goldstein, a doctoral student, both from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Graduate School of Library and Information Science, to enable them to work with a team of colleagues at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales under the leadership of Prof. John Hiller. The activity allows the two teams to join forces in working on complementary projects involving information processing tasks and draws upon a study of children's use of hypertext retrieval systems at UCLA and studies of engineers' use of computer aided design systems (CAD) in Australia. The UCLA team will contribute the information retrieval expertise and a large body of data already available for analysis. The Australian team will contribute the computer- modeling expertise. Plans are for the Australians to visit UCLA in the first half of 1993 to assist in the design of the Science Library Catalog monitoring analysis algorithms under the counterpart Australian grant. It is expected that the UCLA team will go to Australia in August 1993 to further the data modeling and conduct a comparative analysis thus using the complementary expertise in online monitoring of the two teams. Dr Hiller's work deals with a number of methodological issues relevant to studying human-computer interaction in general and information in particular, including graphical data display and expert vs. novice user comparisons. Dr. Borgman's expertise is in the analysis of transaction logs of information retrieval systems and user behavior. Ms. Goldstein's work will be incorporated in her dissertation.
