Student Readers as Authors: Analyzing Markings Made on E-documents in Private or Shared Reading Environments

Abstract

This is a juried paper (12 pages) presented at Session 5.2 titled "The Digital Environment: Online Libraries, Users and Systems" on Thursday, January 13, at the ALISE 2005 Conference, Boston, Massachusetts (Session Moderator: Charley Seavey). The main purpose of this study was to examine participating readers' text markings when they interacted with electronic documents during an active reading process. The readings took place in a private setting, where the readers read e-document for self-use, and in a document sharing setting where each document was shared among a group of students. Based on the results from descriptive and statistical tests, a user-marking taxonomy was derived, which led to the development of a framework for marking ontology. The proposed ontology can then be utilized by web searching agents to enhance the information retrieval capabilities of users working with digital library resources in a semantic web environment.