Although many recent systems have been built to support Information Capture and Retrieval (ICR), these have not generally been successful. This paper presents studies that evaluate two different hypotheses for this failure, firstly that systems fail to address user needs and secondly that they provide only rudimentary support for ICR. Having first presented a taxonomy of different systems built to support ICR, we then describe a study that attempts to identify user needs for ICR. On the basis of that study we carried out two user-oriented evaluations. In the first, we carried out a task-based evaluation of a state-ofthe-art ICR system, finding that it failed to provide users with abstract ways to view meetings data, and did not present users with information categories that they considered to be important. In a second study, we introduce a new method for comparative evaluation of different techniques for accessing meetings data. The second study showed that simple interface techniques that extracted key information from meetings were effective in allowing users to extract gist from meetings data. We conclude with a discussion of outstanding issues and future directions for ICR research.
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.