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This work is concerned with research in the field of electronic publishing and, more particularly, of electronic books. It concentrates on an analysis of the stages of development of an electronic book from the acquisition of the source material to the actual use of electronic books, with particular attention to the interface design issues. The main objective of this research is to demonstrate the appropriateness of adopting the paper book metaphor for representing electronic books, which are specifically designed to be parts of an electronic library. In addition, these electronic books are produced semi-automatically using a flexible publishing environment. A model for an electronic book (hyper-book) and an environment which supplies tools for generating electronic books (hyper-book builder) have been defined and successively developed. Hyper-books are produced by importing electronic texts (in SGML or ASCII format) into an empty template, and by applying a number of tools in order to provide appropriate layout and reader services. Hyper-books incorporate hypertext features (e.g. history facilities and links), paper book features, and some other computer facilities (e.g. search functions). Design principles for hyper-books have been partially deduced from paper publishing and from experiments with electronic books. An application in the environmental domain (in particular, in the area of Global Change) was developed and used in order to evaluate the hyper-book system. The objectives of the evaluation were mainly to assess system usability and utility. An evaluation conducted by assigning a number of tasks to two different groups of subjects (computer experts and computer non-experts) has demonstrated that both groups achieved a good performance; therefore, computer expertise does not represent a significant aid in order to perform better or execute tasks quickly. These results lead to the conclusion that the system is easy to learn and use by everyone, therefore it is appropriate to employ the book metaphor.

This thesis describes research into business user involvement in the information systems application building process. The main interest of this research is in establishing and testing techniques to quantify the relationships between identified success factors and the outcome effectiveness of 'business user development' (BUD). The availability of a mechanism to measure the levels of the success factors, and quantifiably relate them to outcome effectiveness, is important in that it provides an organisation with the capability to predict and monitor effects on BUD outcome effectiveness. This is particularly important in an era where BUD levels have risen dramatically, user centred information systems development benefits are recognised as significant, and awareness of the risks of uncontrolled BUD activity is becoming more widespread. This research targets the measurement and prediction of BUD success factors and implementation effectiveness for particular business users. A questionnaire instrument and analysis technique has been tested and developed which constitutes a tool for predicting and monitoring BUD outcome effectiveness, and is based on the BUDES (Business User Development Effectiveness and Scope) research model - which is introduced and described in this thesis. The questionnaire instrument is designed for completion by 'business users' - the target community being more explicitly defined as 'people who primarily have a business role within an organisation'. The instrument, named BUD ESP (Business User Development Effectiveness and Scope Predictor), can readily be used with survey participants, and has been shown to give meaningful and representative results.

The primary objective of this research was to understand what kinds of knowledge and skills people use in 'extracting' relevant information from text and to assess the extent to which expert systems techniques could be applied to automate the process of abstracting. The approach adopted in this thesis is based on research in cognitive science, information science, psycholinguistics and textlinguistics. The study addressed the significance of domain knowledge and heuristic rules by developing an information extraction system, called INFORMEX. This system, which was implemented partly in SPITBOL, and partly in PROLOG, used a set of heuristic rules to analyse five scientific papers of expository type, to interpret the content in relation to the key abstract elements and to extract a set of sentences recognised as relevant for abstracting purposes. The analysis of these extracts revealed that an adequate abstract could be generated. Furthermore, INFORMEX showed that a rule based system was a suitable computational model to represent experts' knowledge and strategies. This computational technique provided the basis for a new approach to the modelling of cognition. It showed how experts tackle the task of abstracting by integrating formal knowledge as well as experiential learning. This thesis demonstrated that empirical and theoretical knowledge can be effectively combined in expert systems technology to provide a valuable starting approach to automatic abstracting.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the infertile individual's use of the Internet and issues surrounding the debate on whether the Internet proves to be a useful tool or one that hinders healthcare. This was achieved by conducting a total of five studies that take a mixed methods and pragmatic approach to answering the overarching questions of the project. The first study explores the strengths and weaknesses of using the Internet for health. The aim of this is to investigate the reasons why people use the Internet, the frequency of use and importantly why it has become a tool in healthcare. The data was provided by four focus groups and was analysed using thematic analysis. The second study aims to extend this investigation to a wider population and to explore the attitudes of individuals toward ehealth by use of a questionnaire. The third study explores the function and impact of language on infertility and fertility website homepages by analysing the pages using discourse analysis. The fourth study then investigates the usability of these websites by analysing eye movements across the pages, responses to the system usability scale and by individual interviews. The final study in this thesis takes the issues of Internet use for infertile individuals further. It explores the experiential accounts of four women with an infertility diagnosis, who regularly use the Internet. It uses narrative analysis to explore the reasons for using the Internet, what they have gained from it and the impact that it has had on their lives. This thesis has identified that patient identity is changing and that this is aided by access to ehealth information. Participants were attracted to the Internet because of its immediacy, its convenience and because enables them to make informed decisions by accessing both medical information and sharing experiences with other infertile individuals.

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This research started from the observation that the appearance of information contributes to its overall value and that because there is an almost infinite number of possible ways to represent various kinds of information, it is very important to find the one which is going to be the most effective and which conveys as much of the value of the original information. In philosophical terms this concept could be seen as a particular instance of the Platonic vision of the universe, in his latter period, where the real world, the one we share, is only a pale and imperfect imitation of the world of ideas, the perfect one, to which every intellectual should aspire. Images as representations of ideas can help to access or at least get closer to ideas which otherwise would be too difficult to reach for human beings. Appearance has always played a key role in the learning process, as it facilitates the discovery of new concepts by allowing visual association with already familiar ones. This is why metaphors are so important in learning in general, and have therefore proved to be a valuable tool for designing new paradigms when adapting traditional tasks to changed environments. This research has focused on paper books as traditional repositories of information and on the art of paper book design as an effective technique for presenting information that has proven its worth over centuries of use. The next step was to consider if and how to apply the positive experiences from paper book publishing to the production of electronic books. The Visual Book is the result of the translation into electronic terms of the paper book metaphor when applied to scientific publications, with particular emphasis on the visual components of the metaphor. Where possible, the design of the Visual Book has followed the steps of the paper book production process, but it has also employed a technological component to take the new medium into account and has added additional functionalities which the computer can provide to the reader. The evaluation of the Visual Book has shown that the book metaphor has a very high impact on readers, which is particularly due to the firmly established tradition of reading information presented in that form. In this sense the Visual Book experiment has demonstrated both the importance of presentation issues when delivering information, and the value of traditional forms of publishing when defining new ones for an electronic context.

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