An overview of catalog design problems in resource discovery

This paper discusses some of the problems designers face in building catalogues in large networks and relates them back to the resource discovery problem. Currently many catalogues tend to be built in an adhoc fashion – which leads to a great variety in the quality of publically accessible network catalogs. Furthermore, the research surrounding these catalogues tends to focus on narrow technical issues – resulting in difficult to use catalogues. To address this problem, this paper provides a usability framework based upon the library science and human computer interaction literature, and demonstrates some of those principles via an example of a prototype. Our results are interesting to resource discovery tool developers in that we provide a framework for understanding the general resource discovery problem and present some techniques for dealing with those problems.