Visualization of database structures for
information retrieval

Annelise Mark Pejtersen, Grete Lisbjerg Jensen,
Henrik Jensen and Steen Weber

RIS0 National Laboratory, Roskilde, Denmark

Abstract

This paper describes the Book House system, which is designed to support children's
information retrieval in libraries as part of their education. It is a shareware program
available on CD-ROM or floppy disks, and comprises functionality for database searching
as well as for classifying and storing book information in the database. The system concept is
based on an understanding of children's domain structures and their capabilities for
categorization of information needs in connection with their activities in schools, in school
libraries or in public libraries. These structures are visualized in the interface by using
metaphors and multimedia technology. Through the use of text, images and animation, the
Book House encourages children - even at a very early age - to learn by doing in an
enjoyable way, which plays on their previous experiences with computer games. Both words
and pictures can be used for searching; this makes the system suitable for all age groups.
Even children who have not yet learned to read properly can, by selecting pictures, search for
and find those books they would like to have read aloud. Thus, at the very beginning of their
school life, they can learn to search for books on their own. For the library community, such
a system will provide an extended service which will increase the number of children's own
searches and also improve the relevance, quality and utilization of the book collections in the
libraries. A market research report on the need for an annual indexing service for books in
the Book House format is in preparation by the Danish Library Centre A/S.

1. Introduction
It is generally agreed that current information retrieval systems in both public and school
libraries present major problems for child users. These difficulties are particularly
perplexing today when information-retrieval skills play a major role both in education
and, increasingly, in society as a whole. One of the barriers against providing children
with information retrieval skills is the lack of programs for casual and novice users; other
barriers exist between public libraries, school libraries and education in schools. The
purpose of this paper is to describe how a new library system - the Book House - based

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on a perspective of end users' needs, can provide a major contribution to improving
education as well as the utilization of libraries in schools. In this area, many institutional
borders and professional barriers have given rise to artificial distinctions among what in
reality are related disciplines - public libraries, school libraries and education in schools,
though from an organizational viewpoint, these distinctions are already disappearing. In
many countries, no physical distinction can be found between public libraries, school
libraries and schools. Public libraries can be placed in schools and school libraries can be
located in public libraries as well as in schools (Amy, 1987; Sandvik, 1988; Valentine and
Nelson, 1988). Currently, in most European countries, widespread co-operation exists
between school libraries and public-library work, and in services for the preparation,
distribution and circulation of library materials (Kinnell, 1992). Yet from the viewpoint
of computerized library systems, a distinction is usually made between system concepts
for

(a) public libraries, the so-called Online Public Access Catalogues;

(b) school library systems, which are usually quite close to public-library system
concepts;

(c) computer programs used for training students in computer literacy; and

(d) teaching material for education in the use of libraries.

From the users' point of view, no such distinctions between institutions and systems can
be justified, inasmuch as their information needs are motivated from their tasks which, to
be solved properly, often require information retrieval across institutional barriers, rigid
subject domains and school disciplines. Interviews with children in libraries have shown
that their sources and motivations for information retrieval are a mixture of needs and
ideas coming from schools, leisure activities, school libraries, public libraries and mass
media; the expected outcome from the use of material from a search is connected to an
overlapping mixture of tasks, such as solving school problems, gaining new knowledge
and satisfying needs for various reading experiences (Pejtersen, 1986 a and b). Hence, the
Book House system described in this paper is conceived from an understanding of the
users' task-oriented perspective, their information needs and queries, and the levels of
skill needed in information retrieval and computer use. There turns out to be a great
commonalty in children's information-retrieval behaviour and skills across school and
library institutions, which has been taken into account in the design. As a consequence,
the Book House system has proven to be efficient as a tool for both education and
support of information-retrieval tasks in all the above mentioned contexts of public
libraries, school libraries and classroom work. The system encourages an integrated and
interrelated approach.

2. School library use in education
Due to the many developments and innovations in teaching methods, the tasks to be
performed by the school library, and expectations about its support of pedagogical
activities, have gained considerable attention. Project-related teaching, and work in
groups around shifting specific themes and subjects, have forced students to change their
way of working, and the school library has had to do likewise in order to support this
change. Projects and theme work are often cross-disciplinary in their subject matter, and
involve several school subjects. In the higher grades and levels, themes are sometimes

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et al Visualization of database structures

chosen by the pupils themselves. Thus information retrieval has become a necessary work
activity for students as part of this expanded project and theme work. They must learn to
use the school library in the classroom, and gain easy and efficient access to up-to-date
information. In many countries, school libraries have become the central place for pupils'
information-seeking tasks. In keeping with the times, the school library must be able to
provide students their own easy access to electronic information-retrieval (IR) systems
with comprehensive database coverage. Current emphasis on key phrases, such as self-
action, teach and use and learn by doing, reflect the approach under development in all
modern pedagogical activities having to do with school libraries. Yet despite the
widespread introduction of computers in modern education programmes, school libraries
have until now lacked a tool which could be used by the students themselves.

3. Teaching computer use and skills
Recently, it has become mandatory in many European schools to integrate education in
computing into the curriculum of the different disciplines taught. A shift in emphasis has
taken place from teaching computing as a single isolated domain towards teaching how
computers can be used to support problem-solving in different kinds of tasks and settings.
Several implications arise from this shift:

(a) Integration of teaching the use of computers into traditional subjects, such as reading
and learning about the mother tongue, social and natural sciences, etc., leads to their
use as a natural tool for problem-solving activities related to learning the subject
content of a domain.

(b) Teaching computing to provide knowledge about the application of computers in
specific task-functions and in actual work-domains implies exceeding borderlines
between the subjects taught in the classroom context and actual work places outside
the school.

Programs are therefore needed which can serve both as the student's own learning tool
for solving problems, writing papers and exercises, as well as a professional support
vehicle in a work-domain familiar to students or closely related to children's' work in the
classroom.

4. Children's problems with catalogues

Several problems are encountered by children in connection with their comprehension
and full exploitation of a computer system for retrieving information. Such systems were
originally developed to meet librarians' needs for keeping records of their book-stock by
providing computerized access to automated card catalogues. Today, they are used as a
collection of access tools supporting the complete range of disciplines relevant to a
library, as well as self-service information-seeking support tools for untrained and
inexperienced casual library users. Despite continuing re-designs, including the
incorporation of online user-assistance in the form of menus, help displays, informative
error messages and browsing facilities, etc., it is generally agreed that there still exist
major problems for users who are not experts in a field or experienced searchers, or are
not generally familiar with how libraries work (Hancock-Beaulieu, 1989; Hildreth, 1989;
Markey, 1990, Pejtersen, 1992 a and b).

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These problems are mainly related to the large number of mapping processes required of
the user during the search process in order to convert and translate his/her knowledge
structures and language in accordance with the constraints imposed by the search
language and classification schemes used both to classify and to retrieve information in
IR systems. The only stable structure typically available in IR systems to guide users is
the hierarchical structure of a thesaurus and/or classification scheme, which will give most
youngsters problems. Search languages require advanced verbal skills, and classification
schemes require advanced categorizing skills and/or domain knowledge obtainable only
through exhaustive training. The use of IR systems requires capabilities for making
appropriate deductions and inferences about the hierarchical category memberships of
the user's own need, as well as formulating and modifying systematic combinatorial
searches in generic terms. Although some work indicates that, at the age of four,
children's language capability includes some categorical structures (Borgman et ah, 1989),
and that, at an early age, they do have some ability to process hierarchically structured
information (Keil, 1979), they do not possess skills for making hypotheses and
predictions in order to plan a search successfully in conventional information systems.

Piaget's work (Piaget, 1958) suggests that children's capabilities for structural thinking
and abstract reasoning can be divided into several developmental stages. Three of these
have been of relevance in the design context of the Book House for young users from age
six to sixteen:

(a) the intuitive perceptually based stage at which children from four to seven think in
terms of analogues, and rely on sometimes systematic trial-and-error approaches;

(b) the concrete operational stage at which children from seven to eleven possess an
understanding of logical relations and can experiment in a systematic way with some
of the operational structures needed for classification; and

(c) the operational stage at which children from eleven to fifteen can think in terms of
abstract relations and classes, and make exhaustive hypotheses and deductions
completely independently of perceptually based intuitions.

Independent of discussions of specific details of Piaget's work (Boden, 1980; Carey, 1985),
it is obvious that the capability for making appropriate deductive inferences based on
category membership, the understanding of formal logic structures and the use of well-
defined categories will not be available skills in young children to the extent needed in
order to operate within a comprehensive, formal library-classification scheme with its
associated artificial and standardized retrieval language. Even for older children who
have well-developed abilities for making deductive inferences from hierarchical library
schemes, operational use of these schemes will require domain knowledge beyond their
mental capacity.

In short, online catalogues require different types of knowledge and skills that children do
not yet possess, in spite of their growing experience with personal computers, and
familiarity with other modern media - all of which have contributed to their motivation
for using a compatible form for computerized IR. As a result, usable IR systems must not
only be competitive with existing, familiar computer programs and systems accepted by
children, but must also minimize the need for excessively demanding mental juggling
among incompatible languages and categories.

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et al Visualization of database structures

5. Mapping database structures to children's categorization skills

Given these user-characteristics, many conversion and mapping problems can be avoided
by using a classification scheme and a database structure which are compatible with
children's ways of categorizing information. As opposed to hierarchical library
classification models, which are too cognitively demanding to be learned and understood
well enough by children, such a system will make it possible to make database structures
and representations of book content correspond directly to children's intuitive ways of
categorizing their needs. An analysis of 200 protocols reflecting children's search
behaviour and ways of categorizing the domain of books which were recorded in ten
different types of libraries revealed structures and other aspects different from traditional
library classification schemes (Pejtersen, 1986 a and b, 1992 a and b). These were used as
the basis for the classification scheme and database structure, mentioned in paragraph 7.6
below, in the Book House system.

Since a great variety of cognitive skills in the categorization of information is likely to be
found among children, the Book House system was designed to:

(a) match children's different developmental stages and problem-solving skills by
supporting both young children's trial-and-error and intuitive perception-based
searches, and older children's more or less systematic use of abstract relations and
classes, in searching in a stable database structure compatible with their ways of
categorizing information (this also guides children's learning of domain knowledge);

(b) extend their categorization skills by several different interface representations of the
classification structure used in the database - each placing different requirements on
users' intellectual skills and domain knowledge. Each representation needs an
interface content of classification categories and book description that is
understandable by children at varying levels of perceptual and cognitive skills and
training and, in addition, an interface form that is familiar enough to children to
speed up their learning to search in abstract classification categories across the above-
mentioned developmental stages.

In section 7.3 to 7.6 below, four different interface representations of the same database
content are shown, ranging from a graphical display of the complete classification
structure to displays of a structured textual description and unstructured displays of icons.

6. Visualization of database with icons and metaphors

The degree of difficulty involved in problem-solving activities will not only depend on
sufficiently well-developed innate structures needed for operational thinking in Piaget's
terms, but also on the characteristics of the task, its requirements to precision, degree of
detail and, of course, on the user's familiarity with the task situation. It is well known that
everyday thinking is more likely to rely on analogies with past examples and rules of
thumb than on logical abstract reasoning within clear and well-formulated categories
(Rasmussen, 1986). This implies that interface displays should take advantage of these
abilities by using icons or pictures with reference to familiar, preferably, concrete objects,
which tap familiar situations and prompt common-sense reasoning.

First, icons used as metaphors can enable the user to transfer intuition and skill from a
familiar situation in another context to the functionality of the IR system. In order fully

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to support users' ability to make analogies to familiar objects and events, icons should
represent both the database system, the system's retrieval functionality including options
for user actions, and the database content. Usually, the interface menus of IR systems do
not reveal much of the basic semantic structure of the database content Even if they do,
users will often still be in trouble since the structure used for organizing the semantics of
the database content will most likely not match their own way of structuring the concepts
used to reflect their reading need. Genuine support is best given by providing a
visualization of the structure imposed on the database content through several types of
icon reflecting the categories and principles actually used intuitively by children. The
Book House interface is tailored to children's abilities to categorize and understand
concepts, as determined from their associative responses to pictures and words in a
controlled, multiple-choice association test (Pejtersen, 1990).

Secondly, it is well known that pictures are easier and faster to learn than text. They can
also be perceived independently of the users' language capabilities. They are faster to
'read' than text since one icon can communicate very complex messages that would take
much language to explain - a picture can say much more than a thousand words. Pictures
can thus efficiently express subject information and conceptual relationships. They are
easier to remember and to recognize once learned, which is advantageous since
recognition of information is easier than recall of information. Visually, we can process a
far larger amount of information than in any other form. We can, for instance, recognize
a well-known face in a crowd, while we might have problems in recalling and verbally
describing this face. In the same way, it is easier to use a map of a town than process a
verbal instruction.

7. Book House Search: database retrieval
There are two entries into the Book House system: Book House Search for searching
information from the database, and Book House Write for indexing and storing new
information in the database.

Book House Search supports several repetitive decision tasks: formulation of a user's
problem and need, choice of search strategy, execution of search, evaluation of relevance
of retrieved books compared with user-need, revision of search, etc. The Book House
assists children's accomplishment of retrieval and indexing tasks without assistance from
adults. Several types of help are available, as well as facilities for experimenting and
generally playing around with the system in a trial-and-error mode.

7.1 Book House metaphor

As they learn, children are likely to try to build a mental model of their problem-space and
its representation in the database system in order to understand and predict the content and
functionality of the system. Spavold (Spavold, 1990) found that children would
spontaneously make images of databases during their use in the classroom. Our evaluation
studies offer ample evidence that the choice of a Book House metaphor enables children to
make easy analogies between their everyday life experiences and corresponding objects and
tools in a house, and their functionality (Goodstein and Pejtersen, 1989). Even very young
children have been able to use the system and achieve successful results.

When the user explores the screen with the mouse, a text line at the bottom follows the

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et ah Visualization of database structures

Figure 1

mouse movements and gives two kinds of messages. If the mouse is not in an area with
selectable objects, the text 'Move the mouse and see what you can do' appears. When the
mouse points at a selectable object, a square is drawn around the icon to evoke the user's
attention and to indicate the mouse-sensitive limits of the object. A message appears
telling the user to press the mouse button, with information on what will happen next.
These help texts support interactive, self-activated 'learning by doing' during the user's
exploration of information on the screen. They also support first-time users in
understandmg the meaning of each icon: prototype testing with users has shown that not
all children will be able to interpret the meaning of icons and predict a unique retrieval
action associated with a particular icon.

7.2 A room for database choice

Figure 2

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The Book House system contains a database with children's fiction, a database with
children's non-fiction, and a database that combines fiction and non-fiction.

7.3 A room for choice of search strategy

Figure 3

The four strategies are (Figure 3, from the left):

(a) the associate search by analogy based on prototypes for books similar to the book the
user has in mind;

(b) the intuitive strategy of browsing through icons for recognizing a perhaps unidentified
need by means of pictures on a 'flip-over' projector;

(c) the analytical subject search strategy represented as objects on a work table; and

(d) browsing shelves, which give access to a browsing through the book stock strategy as a
means for getting inspiration on what to read.

7.4 Find books similar to a known book

When a search by analogy is chosen from the left side of the strategy room, a model book

Figure 4

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et al. Visualization of database structures

is displayed with two options on the front cover: Author and Title. Based on the user's
specification of his/her model book, the system uses the corresponding model-book
description on the screen as the basis for finding other similar books in the database by
means of probabilistic techniques.

7.5 Browse album with Picture Association Thesaurus

Figures

Children often use pictures on the front cover in their searches, as well as in their
assessment of the relevance and value of content of books. In a significant extension of
this, users can browse and search for books in the Picture Association Thesaurus by
selecting among icons symbolizing the subject content of books. When searching via an
icon, book meanings normally mediated by many keywords become available. Such a
pictorial representation produces only associatively related concepts displayed at levels
corresponding to a broad range of more or less well-defined categorization skills. No
verbal skills are needed to search by selection of an icon with a mouse.

7.6 A room with work table for classification subject search

Figure 6

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Requiring knowledge about the names of fields in database records when formulating a
precise search query can be avoided by making the structure of the database visible using
appropriate icons (Figure 6).

The poster on the wall gives access to subject-matter keywords: books about family life,
quarrels, anorexia nervosa, happiness, etc. The world globe on the table and the clock on
the wall give access to keywords on time and geographical places such as books about
teenagers' life in Los Angeles in the nineties. The view out of the window gives access to
keywords about the environment, social and professional settings, for example books
about sport among Jewish children living in busy families in big cities. The masks on the
wall give access to keywords related to emotional experiences, such as curiosity or
excitement, evoked in the reader during the reading process. The icon showing the author
sitting with his typewriter gives access to keywords concerning the author's intention to
put forward ideas and/or opinions. The glasses on the table give access to keywords on
the accessibility of books, their readability, language level, the age for being read aloud or
read by the child him/herself, the size of the typography, etc. The card-catalogue drawers
give access to keywords on traditional genres such as war stories or suspense stories.

7.7 Browse through book descriptions

FIND SUBJECT; SEEBOOKDESCRI

PLACE
SETTING
TIME
INFORMATION
EXPERIENCE
GENRE
READABILITY
EDITION

Ingemarm, B.S.
Erik Menveds
The murder of king Erik

The nobleman
being murdered by

childhood 231 pages.
Erik dipping a Finderup Lade.

Pet a Hcsselaad his allegiance to the king, who is
rebellious noblemen lead by MarskStig.

Upper cliss. Kings
1288-**.
A description of
Exiting.
Novel Biography.

Difficult to read.
1982. SeriiL

court.

a! egiance and patriotism.

Historical novel.
Normal.

Ad It b o o t

noblemen

Figure 7

When the icon browsing through book shelves is chosen in the right side of the strategy
room, the system pops up with randomly chosen book descriptions and information on
book content. Each time this strategy is activated, a new set of book descriptions is used
(see book description immediately below in 7.8).

7.8 Open book with book description

Book descriptions are structures according to the classification system to enable the user
to see the correspondence between his/her selected category of terms and the contents of
each book. The user can then browse and turn pages one after the other in both directions
by clicking on the lower red corners of the book showing one arrow. The user can modify

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et at Visualization of database structures

the current need by adding search terms through a selection of red keywords from the
book description, or removing terms with the eraser icon. When selected with the mouse,
they are automatically combined with Boolean operators. The book case shows the
number of retrieved books.

7.9 Search example

A realistic search query culled from our user studies illustrates a typical use of the system.
A child of twelve needs to find books for her Natural Science class; she wants to choose a
topic for group work on 'pollution'. She wants to find 'an exciting book with a blue cover
and with a moon and whales on the front cover*. She does not remember the title or the
author's name, since the source of information about the book is a friend from another
class who showed it to her. Her motivation for looking for this particular item is the
recommendation by her friend, who had been told by her teacher to read this book on
pollution for a mother-tongue lesson.

She selects the door action icon and enters the Book House. She selects the room in the
middle to search in the database with fiction and non-fiction for children. Having a fairly
good idea about the characteristics of the desired book, she chooses the work table with
classification access. First, she selects the masks on the wall to search for exciting books,
then the book on the table to search for colours and pictures on the front cover. She looks
at the result of the search shown as book descriptions. Having checked the emotional
experience 'exciting' to be gamed by reading the books and the cover designs 'blue, moon
and whales', she realizes that the subject is on 'whales at the point of extinction due to
pollution of the sea'. She decides to take a print-out and uses the printer icon. She
continues to browse retrieved books and uses the book in hand icon to put aside
interesting candidates to be printed at the end of the search.

8. Book House Write: classification and editing the database

New books can be added to the database and existing books can be edited. A typical task
of storing information about a book will involve indexing, i.e. the analysis and
representation of the book to be searched for and displayed in the Book House Search
system. This activity includes: check whether the book is already in the database; if not,
select a card to fill in a book description; skim the book, possible reviews and other
material; formulate a new description using standard categories; save the book
description in the database, which is then updated.

8.1 Blank card for a new book

When adding new descriptions to the database, the blue New Book card catalogue is
chosen, with blank cards and labels for empty categories ready to be filled in. When
editing existing book descriptions, the yellow Titles catalogue or the green Authors
catalogue gives access to a known item. The red All catalogue gives access to browsing
through all the books in the database for examples of book descriptions. This is a useful
option relevant in unfamiliar situations since it provides inspiration on how to solve a
classification problem.

The basic principle is that a book description can be made with very little effort; and

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TTBOO
Iktctolbtc

l*T>*"*^~-< * * ' ^ * Y ^ S ^

« *

Figure 8

practically no knowledge about classification or indexing is needed. The intention has
been to make children progress gradually in their learning about the storage of
information in the database. As in Book House Search, help is provided by a text line at
the bottom of the screen informing the user about what to do by showing an example of a
book description typical for the category touched with the mouse. The life belt icon
activates help by giving an example of a fully indexed book and, if desired, detailed
information about the purpose and principles that need to be applied when indexing
within varied book categories. Finally, a written folder is available on indexing options.

8.2 Card with book description from the database

Figure 9

Changing descriptions of books already stored in the database will require the user to
fetch the book from the database by selecting the action icons of Author or Title card
catalogues at the top of the screen. A yellow card filled in with book descriptions already

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et al. Visualization of database structures

saved in the database is then displayed, and the user can now work with this card in
exactly the same way as with the white card.

8.3 Classification example

A school class in the 6th grade (children of about 11 years old) at the Peder Lykke School
in Copenhagen had a one-month project in which the mother-tongue teacher co-operated
with the school librarian. The overall purpose of the project was to teach children to
review books and to prepare their reviews by means of a computer for subsequent
database retrieval. Children chose books from the school library according to their own
interests, and their task was to make a book review of their own books for the benefit of
the other children in the class. They prepared their review on a paper form corresponding
to the blank card for new books, and later used the card in the Book House to store their
reviews. This took about IS minutes. Teaching in advance of and during the project
involved an introduction to literary text analysis by explaining the meaning of the
categories in the form. They were also taught about how to prepare data for information
retrieval through the selection of the keywords necessary to communicate the most
important aspects of a book. The class created a database with 45 books, and enjoyed
retrieving each others' books as well as accessing another database, which they found,
created by a 9th grade class (children of about 14 years old) (Jensen and Acker, 1992 a, b
andc).

9. Integrating IR and computer use in libraries and schools
Recently, many efforts have been made to integrate the traditional concept of a library as
a place for information retrieval of books with the role of the school in the training of
young people to be skilled and knowledgeable in the use of computers. One approach is
the extension of the library concept into a media centre in public and school libraries
through the development of systems comprising all types of media: multimedia
technologies, computer programs, video and tape recordings, etc., and building a
collection of programs for loan in the media library.

Several experiments have been carried out to try to integrate school-teaching of
traditional subjects with teaching about work in a library, i.e. its book collection and its
use. For instance, this has been done by training young people in book-acquisition tasks,
and having them overtake the actual task of buying books for the library for a couple of
months during mother-tongue classes. Through the review process, they learned to
generate literary-quality assessments, and to formulate their reading experiences.
Children actually learned the trade-off involved in carrying out real-life tasks, and they
enjoyed for once not being encumbered by the usual 'let's pretend' type of project.
Activating co-operation between school children, teachers and librarians in serious, real-
life tasks had positive effects on children's reading habits and their use of the library
(Weinrich 1991; Hussmann, 1992). Such initiatives can continue throughout life-long
educational activities, and can carry with them an active contact with the local
community and its organizations involved in communicating knowledge (Kinnell, 1992).
Working with the Book House in integrated activities in both a library and a school
setting has given many valuable experiences about the effects of the system on children.
Apart from the obvious purpose of teaching computer skills, there is evidence that the
system has other advantageous effects:

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• It encourages children to do their own searches in public and school libraries, and to
do them more effectively, in direct response to their daily information needs for the
preparation of class-work and leisure activities. The system has much in common
with computer games and is perceived by children to be as exciting a challenge. It is
easy to use for the first-time user, but is not tedious or too simple for expert users.
With the current database of children's books, it is suitable for many different types
of subject searches. The browse-through-icons option is particularly useful for
children who do not master the reading of lists of keywords. That this is feasible has
been demonstrated by the Book House evaluation process, where children proved to
be more than enthusiastic about doing their own searches on computers in libraries
(Goodstein and Pejtersen, 1989).

• It increases the number of books read, and widens reading tastes. Evaluation of the
Book House system in libraries, and results from the experiments mentioned here,
clearly indicate that use of the Book House in school libraries and in class work will
increase the number of books read and the number of visits to the library, change
children's reading patterns, and widen their taste as they become aware of hitherto
neglected literature. Special care was devoted to the development of a database for
fiction subject-retrieval in order to increase the use of the fiction stock in public and
school libraries. Indexing of specific subjects in fiction is usually not a service
offered to libraries, mainly due to the many problems that have been encountered in
earlier attempts to develop classification schemes for fiction. The retrieval and
promotion of fiction have become even more difficult because of the high number of
new published books each year, since (ideally speaking) these have to be read and
remembered by the librarians who are the traditional mediators of borrowed fiction.
Not all books in the library stock can be read, nor remembered when read, during
actual dialogues with users.

• It teaches how to formulate and solve an information-retrieval problem, improving the
education and training of children in storing and retrieving information via a
uniform platform, i.e., a system common for both the teaching situation in the
classroom and the retrieval situation in the library. Book House Write can be an
important facility for Unking language from text analysis and evaluation to
language used for database development and information retrieval. Dealing with
terminology problems between school class-work and database language has been
reported by Borgman (1991) as an important problem.

Children from the 4th grade (nine years old) can make their own database, and search on
their own book descriptions with automatically converted red keywords, without having
to go through all the categories and fields of a blank card. Only author and title are
mandatory. Children's subjective experiences and principles adopted for the classification
of a book can be communicated to other children in a special field for personal
comments. Older children can try to develop a controlled vocabulary and begin to
understand the differences between free, natural-language text and a controlled
vocabulary, as well as the important roles of precision and consistency in handling
language in connection with database construction. This experience will not only increase
knowledge about the library; it can be generalized to the use of computers for IR and
indexing in many other fields than the library. Experiments by Spavold (1990) involving
the use of a database in classroom teaching confirmed that children who used it both for
data input and for output/retrieval understood the system's functionality and search

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Annelise Mark Pejtersen et at Visualization of database structures

procedures better, and could formulate more diverse queries, than those children who
used the database only for searching. It helped in the learning of interrogation and
formulation of good queries. Most children enjoyed both coding and data entry, as well
as searching for information. There were no preferences for more problem-solving
activity (involved in retrieval) as contrasted with the more repetitive, routine and yet high-
precision task involved in the preparation and coding of data. This has been confirmed in
experiments with the Book House system.

• It improves skills for text analysis and evaluation. Two traditional goals which
teachers and school librarians have in common can control the use of the Book
House: to motivate children to read books of a quality not typical for their age
group, and to teach children literary analysis as a basis for generating book reviews.
Work then takes on a practical goal, and has the effect that is physically visible and
useful for the whole class.

In a Book House Search and Write project for the 9th grade (children of about 14 years
old), the teacher and school librarian chose 20 normally not very popular books, a
mixture of adult books that might be read by teenagers and books of high quality for
teenagers. They asked the students to classify these books for the Book House database.
The purpose was not only to draw their attention to these books, but also to create a
database for retrieval in the school library that would draw the attention of the children
of the same age for these particular types of book. Thus the database serves as a
communication tool which widens children's reading perspectives, and broadens their
view from purely personal reading experiences to more of a critical-analysis approach. As
a tool for the analysis of books from about the 4th to 10th grade (children from 9 to
about 16), the classification categories can be used to prompt a number of questions
about a book.

• It supports cross-disciplinary teaching, and the existing custom in education of
integrating fiction and non-fiction in those subject fields where such an integration
is appropriate - for instance, history, social science, natural science - by allowing
similar and specific subject accesses to both fiction and non-fiction.

10. Present and future
The Book House is now available as two shareware programs. One is for the retrieval and
indexing of fiction for children and adults in public libraries, with a database content of
3,500 novels from different countries which have been translated into Danish. The second
is for school libraries, and covers the retrieval and indexing of both fiction and non-
fiction with a database containing both children's fiction and non-fiction. It was released
in the summer of. 1993 by Apple on a CD-ROM, and by RIS0 on floppy disks, and will
be distributed to Scandinavian school libraries in the near future. The Danish Library
Centre A/S, which provides Danish libraries with bibliographical data, will conduct
market research this Autumn, 1994, on the number of libraries that will subscribe to a
centralized indexing service which supplies books with new data in a format that matches
the classification of books in the Book House database. If the response from libraries is
sufficient in number, the delivery of data to the Book House system will become a service
similar to other data deliverables to Danish libraries. The project is currently being
continued by extending the use of multimedia, and by the development of an adaptive,
multimedia interface including interactive user-modelling. In addition, the Book House

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project is being expanded to a Nordic Book House System with participation from the
other Nordic countries.

Acknowledgements

A large number of people from the library community, research institutes and industrial
companies in Denmark are gratefully acknowledged for their important and influential
contributions to the Book House system design, software development in C++, indexing,
graphics and evaluation: Steen Agger, Len Goodstein, Jutta Austin, Inge Cramer, Finn
Nielsen, Peter Speck, Lena Lundgren, Ringa Sandelin, Steffan Villumsen, Henrik Gren,
and Bjarne Acker. Institutions and funding: RIS0 National Laboratory, The Royal
Academy of Arts, Peder Lykke School, The Royal School of Librarianship, Hjortespring
Public Library, Apple Computer A/S (Tom Jacobsgard), The Educational University
(Kurt Hartvig, Gunnar Jacobsen), The National Foundation for Public and School
Libraries, and the Council of Nordic Ministers. A special thanks to L.P. Goodstein for
making the English more readable.

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