Interface Issues for Interactive Multimedia Documents

While extensive standards have been developed for the representation of objects within complex multimedia documents, much less attention has been paid to the usability of these documents. Key features of electronic text-document browsers are identiied and the ways these might be applied to multimedia documents are discussed. Some of these features include Tables of Contents (TOCs), linking, and indexing. Several novel interfaces for digitized multimedia lectures demonstrate how TOCs can provide access to high-level multimedia structures.