People frequently must sort through and identify relevant materials from a large set of documents, such as looking through the results of a web search. During this process of document triage there is reading and organizing activity. Moreover, these tasks can occur in different applications. A user's interests can be identified from reading and organizing activity and used as a basis for providing cues to other potential documents of interest in the set. To most effectively identify related documents of interest, activity data must be collected from all applications used in document triage. In this paper we present a common framework (the Interest Profile Manager) for collecting and analyzing user interest. We also present models for identifying user interest based only on reading activity, only on organizing activity, and models incorporating both reading and organizing activity. A study comparing document values calculated using the different models shows that incorporating interest information from both reading and organizing activity more accurately estimates users' valuation of documents than using either type of activity alone.

Document triage is the practice of quickly determining the merit and disposition of relevant documents. This practice involves selection of documents from a document overview and quick forms of reading: skimming, reading short portions of a longer document, and navigating through headings, indices, and tables of contents. Earlier studies of document triage practice showed considerable overhead related to window management during transitions between the document overview and reading interfaces. This study examines the impact of multiple display configurations on document triage practice. In particular, it compares (1) configurations with same and different size displays, and (2) configurations with and without user control over which activity is performed on which display. Results show a significant increase in the number of transitions between activities when a multi-display configuration is introduced although there is no significant difference between the different multiple display configurations. Additionally, user activity with a document was positively correlated with an overall assessment of document value.

People engaged in knowledge work must often rapidly identify valuable material from within large sets of potentially relevant documents. Document triage is a type of sensemaking task that involves skimming documents to get a sense of their content, evaluating documents to assess their worth in the context of the current activity, and organizing documents to prepare for their subsequent use and more in-depth reading. We have performed a study of document triage by collecting multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to characterize how 24 subjects read about a new topic and assessed and organized a set of 40 relevant Web documents. Our results indicate that there are multiple strategies for document triage, each involving different styles of reading, interacting, and organizing. Common strategies include: 1) focused reading early in the task, relegating the organizing until later in the process; 2) skimming performed in tandem with organizing, which relies on gaining an incremental understanding of the topic; and 3) metadata-based organizing, a strategy that stresses working with document surrogates to minimize the time spent reading. The findings suggest ways applications may better support the intertwined nature of the browsing, reading, and organizing activities in document triage.

For open-ended information tasks, users must sift through many potentially relevant documents, a practice we refer to as document triage. Normally, people perform triage using multiple applications in concert: a search engine interface presents lists of potentially relevant documents; a document reader displays their contents; and a third tool-a text editor or personal information management application-is used to record notes and assessments. To support document triage, we have developed an extensible multi-application architecture that initially includes an information workspace and a document reader. An Interest Profile Manager infers users' interests from their interactions with the triage applications, coupled with the characteristics of the documents they are interacting with. The resulting interest profile is used to generate visualizations that direct users' attention to documents or parts of documents that match their inferred interests. The novelty of our approach lies in the aggregation of activity records across applications to generate fine-grained models of user interest.