College and Research Libraries


368 College & Research Libraries 

Dillon, Andrew. Designing Usable Elec-
tronic Text: Ergonomic Aspects of Human 
Information Usage. Bristol, Pa.: Taylor 
and Francis, 1994. 195p. $37.50 cloth 
(ISBN 0-7484-0112-1), $18 paper (ISBN 
0-7 484-0113-4). 
Ergonomic considerations of the 

printed word began with the invention 
of movable type. The early history of print 
is marked by efforts to design printed ob-
jects that would not only be familiar to 
readers within a manuscript culture, but 
that would make the complex act of read-
ing pleasurable and informative. Often the 
design of books reflected the theoretical 
considerations of highly educated print-
ers, such as Aldus Manutius, with practi-
cal design issues of legibility and ease of 
use. The Aldine editions of Dante, for 
example, were printed without the ex-
tensive commentaries found in earlier 
editions, in a smaller octavo format using 
Aldus Manutius' new italic font, suggest-
ing that the famous humanist-printer 
wished to have his readers directly en-
counter classic texts. Paratextual fea-
tures-such as title pages, tables of 
contents, indexes, location and extent of 
glosses-which appeared in bewilder-
ing arrays during the century after the 
invention of print, were developed to 
make information found in these vol-
umes more accessible, easier to read, and 
frequently more portable and less costly. 

Andrew Dillon's examination of the 
ergonomics of electronic text thus falls 
within a long tradition of book/print 
design. As in the Renaissance, the new 
technology of electronic text requires a 
systematic assessment of the strengths 
of older technologies, such as print, and 
models which will make exploitation of 
the new technology more effective and 
marketable. Dillon's well-designed and 
attractively printed volume will not 
serve as a cookbook for designers of elec-
tronic texts. His analysis and conclu-
sions suggest models in which the 
design of electronic texts should occur 
and by which they can be assessed rather 
than a set of rules to be applied. 

Dillon's conception of electronic text 
is extremely flexible, and would seem to 
include any information resource that 

July 1995 

can be apprehended by a human. As 
such, we might include character-based 
documents, bitmapped images of docu-
ments, composite documents combining 
text, image, and other elements (such as 
audio or video). I would presume that 
documents compiled from the results of 
queries in one or more databases would 
also be considered by Dillon as elec-
tronic text. Further, Dillon sees that hy-
pertextual links or cross-references are 
vital components of electronic text. The 
ergonomics of electronic text, in Dillon's 
view, combines the ways in which access 
to information is performed with the 
textual organization and on-screen dis-
play attributes. I 

Given this broad definition of elec-
tronic text, Dillon proposes a task-ori-
ented framework of e-text design based 
on four overlapping components of the 
reading experience: "1) a task model ... 
that deals with the reader's needs and 
uses for the material; 2) an information 
model . .. that provides a model of the 
information space; 3) a set of manipula-
tion skills and facilities ... that support 
physical use of the material; ~nd, 4) a 
serial reading processor ... that repre-
sents the cognitive and perceptual proc-
essing involved in reading words and 
sentences." 

Readers approach a body of material 
with very specific goals and skills which 
must be understood and facilitated by 
the database designer. We are all very 
familiar with t~e different cognitive acts 
of scanning an academic journal for re-
cent research trends, reading a collection 
of verse, and looking up a command 
from our favorite software package. Of 
particular importance is the organiza-
tion of "information space," since all in-
formation is located within a much 
larger context found within a particular 
document, and given an increasingly in-
tegrated network environment, within 
constellations of disparate documents. 
Electronic texts must be designed to en-
able readers to find and navigate infor-
mation using a variety of cues, ranging 
from tables of contents and headers to 
complex hypertextual cross-references 
between texts located on networks. 



The underlying strength of Dillon's 
analysis is his sophisticated view of the 
complex of activities associated with the 
act of reading. Much of this volume is 
devoted to a discussion of previous re-
search from many fields, such as cogni-
tive science and psychology, on the act of 
reading. It is dear that basic technical 
aspects of reading electronic text, such as 
image quality and organization of on-
screen displays, are as important as print 
fonts and page formatting are to printed 
documents. There are many subtle as-
pects of textuality and reading, such as 
the ability of readers to grasp and retain 
the overall structure of a document and 
an argument, which have been rarely 
discussed in examinations of reading of 
either print or electronic text. In Dillon's 
view, no single discipline, such as cogni-
tive psychology or information retrieval, 
adequately explains the reading process . . 
Thus, his discussion attempts to draw 
points of contact between a number of 
different conceptions of reading or, per-
haps more accurately, information con-
sumption. 

It is to Dillon's great credit that he sees 
broad lines of continuity between print 
and electronic text. The organization of 
print and electronic reference materials, 
such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, 
are rather similar. Dillon suggests that 
proponents of hypermedia have failed 
to grasp the degree to which users of 
print documents rarely read in purely 
sequential fashion. While it may be 
slightly less convenient to jump from 
place to place in a printed document, 
there are many cues to entice the reader 
to break the linear order of the printed 
book, including indexes, tables of con-
tents, foot- and end-notes, not to men-
tion cross-references and other points 
where authors recall or anticipate re-
lated discussions. Finally, Dillon warns 
us in several places, electronic resources 
will not completely supersede print me-
dia at all. It is obvious, he suggests, that 
few people would want to read a lengthy 
text of any kind in its electronic rather 
than print form. Thus, "one should 
avoid seeing electronic text as a competi-
tor to paper in some form of 'either-or' 

Book Reviews 369 

challenge for supremacy." The two 
forms of text will exist as complements 
to each other, distinguished by the tasks 
best performed by each medium: "The 
strengths of the computer will enable 
cheap storage and rapid access while the 
intimacy and familiarity of paper will be 
retained for detailed studying and ex-
amination of material." 

The degree to which electronic text 
becomes an important distributive me-
dia, alongside print, largely depends on 
the degree to which electronic text de-
sign can make information responsive to 
the requirements of readers and the de--
mands of particular kinds of textual in-
formation.-Mark Olsen, University of 
Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 

A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. Ed. 
Nicolas Barker. London: British Li-
brary, 1993. 206p. $40 (ISBN 0-7123-
0287-5). 
The title of this collection is from Mil-

ton: "Books are not absolutely dead 
things but doe contain a potencie of life 
in them to be as active as the soule 
whose progeny they are." This animis-
tic credo nicely epitomizes a volume 
which brings together under the editor-
ship of Nicolas Barker an admirable set 
of articles on the history of the book. 
Based on lectures given at UCLA in 
1986-87, the collection provides a useful 
introduction to the range of topics and 
methodologies that coexist under the ru-
bric of "the history of the book." In fact, 
Barker contends that the history of the 
book is more than a field of study; it is 
a genuine discipline in its own right. 
Thus Barker and his collaborator, Thomas 
Adams, begin the volume with a found-
ing manifesto, a "new model for the 
study of the book," one which seeks to 
provide a more defined and functional 
conception of the new discipline than 
Robert Darnton's earlier "communica-
tions circuit" did: "Our scheme is de-
signed to encompass all the topics 
that would properly be included in 
the history of the book. .. . What we 
offer is a map." Models are, I suppose, 
necessary evils; we chafe at their preten-
sions and confinements but find their