ACM News | DOI: 10.1145/1897816.1897828
Gary Anthes
Acm Launches
new Digital Library
More than 50 years of computing literature is augmented, streamlined,
and joined to powerful new tools for retrieval and analysis.

The aCM has just launched a new version of its Digital Library (DL), the first major overhaul of its vast store of computing literature in almost 10 years. The information services offered by the new library have been enhanced and tweaked dramatically, usability and performance have been improved, connections to external services have been added, and much new content, including multimedia, is available. Most fundamentally, the DL has evolved from a relatively simple keyword search and journal article retrieval model to one in which users can see the connections—and the strength of connections—among topics, journals, articles, authors, collaborators, institutions, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and conferences.

“It’s all about showing users the
context in which something fits, so
they know that there is more to this
space than just their ability to grab an
article and go,” says ACM’s Director of
Information Services Wayne Graves.
“It’s about surfacing and leveraging
information in different ways.”
The DL now explicitly recognizes
that many users do not work top-down
from the library’s home page (the orig-
inal model) but come in directly at the
citation page for a given article—often
sent there by an external search en-
gine. “The citation page has become
the front door,” explains Graves, the
chief architect of the new library sys-
tem. “So a design goal was to get as
much information there as we can.”
Information on the citation page
now appears in three logical blocks.
The first contains the basic informa-
tion about the article such as title, au-
thor, and publication name; links to
author profiles; links to the journal or
conference home page, table of con-
tents, and archives; and bibliometrics

A conference page in the new Acm Digital Library.

 

(numbers of downloads and citations). The second block serves up clickable options to buy an article, to request permissions, to save the article to a personal binder or workspace, to export it in various formats, or to send it via email or to external services such as Slashdot, Facebook, and Twitter. The third section has 10 tabs that bring up information about the article, such as source materials, references, citations, reviews, and comments. An “index terms” tab shows pointers to other articles on the same and related topics.

Joshua Hailpern, a Ph.D. candidate
in computer science at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has
used ACM’s digital services for nearly
a decade, and recently served on a
panel of users to evaluate ACM DL
prototypes. “The information used to
be sort of dumped on the user in this
long, difficult-to-navigate layout,” he
says. “What they did is ask, ‘What’s
the information users care about
first?’ And they kept it simple.”
A key enabler of many of the DL’s new
capabilities, and for a number of older
ones, is an architecture that puts a great
deal of emphasis on the capture and use
of metadata—searching and linkable
data about entities in the library, such
as publication, author, institution, cita-
tion, or SIG. “The amount of metadata
that we capture is very large, and that’s
absolutely key to our new capabilities,”
says Bernard Rous, director of publica-
tions. “We made that as robust as pos-
sible so we can do all kinds of calcula-
tions and manipulations.”
For example, the DL now offers new
and powerful ways to look at confer-
ences. Before, a user could retrieve
conference proceedings for a past con-
ference, but other information about
it, or about future conferences, was
not readily at hand. Now a map of the
world can be zoomed in on to show
ACM conferences in a given city or re-
gion. Click on a conference and links
to a conference profile page, the con-
ference Web site, and proceedings are
revealed. Tag cloud representations
provide snapshots of subject area con-
centration for conferences and SIGs—
with differing font sizes showing rela-
tive importance—and will soon do so
for conference acceptance rates over
time via color charts.