The Design and Development of Interactive Multimedia Conference Proceedings

Many conferences are now providing electronic proceedings. Often, these proceedings are little more than electronic collections of documents put together in a standard software package, such as SuperBook or Acrobat. This means that few of these proceedings incorporate the full range of materials that a conference generates. Furthermore, because these general interfaces are not designed for conference proceedings, they do not provide all the features a conference warrants.The interactive multimedia proceedings for the DAGS'92 Institute on Parallel Computation used an interface designed specifically for presenting conference materials and provided both talks (audio, video, and slides) and papers (in hypertext form) along with an extensive set of features for navigating and using the proceedings. This interface provided the basis for further work on the design and creation of electronic proceedings. As we developed the electronic proceedings for DAGS'93 and DAGS'94 we surveyed users of the prior proceedings and reevaluated this interface. This evaluation suggested many alternatives and extensions to the interface and led us to redesign and reimplement the DAGS interactive proceedings interface.In this paper, we summarize the materials and features that comprise conference proceedings, describe and evaluate the DAGS'92 interface and detail the changes and decisions made in developing the new interface used for DAGS'93 and DAGS'94.