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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 1999 14:58:28 -0700
From: Leysia Palen <Leysia.Palen@Colorado.EDU>
To: ics-news@psych.colorado.edu, Barkerl@Colorado.EDU, Zigurs@Colorado.EDU,
    Michele.Jackson@Colorado.EDU, l3d-local@cs.colorado.edu,
    crudman@advtech.uswest.com, Curtis.Lebaron@Colorado.EDU

CS COLLOQUIUM

Putting Working Document Collections Online

Lucy Suchman
Xerox PARC

NOTE SPECIAL DATE AND TIME
February 8, 1999
4:00 - 5:00 pm
Engineering Center Classroom 245

Refreshments will be served afterwards in ECOT 831.

The Carquinez Bridge Replacement Project is a civil engineering initiative
within the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), charged with
the design of a replacement bridge over the Carquinez Straits at the north
end of the San Francisco Bay.  For the past two years I and my colleagues
in the Work Practice & Technology area at Xerox PARC have been engaged in a
collaborative research effort with engineers in the Carquinez Project
group, focussed on a collection of documents called the engineering project
files.  Together we're exploring what it would mean to create an electronic
version of the files, currently maintained on paper in three ring binders.

The project files are an instance of what we've termed working document
collections, occupying a niche between the active documents on one's
desktop and those stored in an archive.   Project files are maintained by
every project team at Caltrans, and comprise a kind of cumulative
documentary record of a given engineering project.  The documents in the
files are extremely heterogeneous, ranging from standard business
correspondence to quite specialized charts, maps and other exhibits tied to
the particular requirements of civil engineering.  Documents are filed
according to the Caltrans Uniform Filing System, a hierarchically arranged
set of categories designed roughly to map the chronological course of a
project.  Our intervention is aimed at defining the work practice and
technology requirements for migrating the project files from paper to
digital media, integrated with Caltrans' developing intranet.  Our approach
is to require minimal overhead for putting documents into the collection,
while providing opportunities for arbitrarily extensible, iterative, and
modifiable document coding, and multiple strategies for document retrieval.

Host:  Leysia Palen
------------------------------
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~laurav/colloquia/index.html

Sign Language Interpreters Available Upon Request.  Please contact Pat
Libhart, Department of Computer Science, Engineering  ECOT 717,
303-492-7514, at least five days prior to the colloquim.