Toward an enriched (and revitalized) sense of help: Summary of an ASIS&T 2005 panel session

In Jan 2005, the NSF-sponsored GovStat project sponsored a symposium on help. The goal of the symposium was to discuss what project members, federal agency colleagues and others had learned about the problems with existing help facilities for large public-access Web sites and to start forming a new vision of what help could and should be. At the 2005 ASIS&T meeting in Charlotte, NC, the authors reunited symposium participants to share and discuss the symposium findings with the ASIS&T community. The session emphasized that the single word help encompasses a vast array of support tools and information. On one extreme, a well designed tool for a straightforward, well-specified task could eliminate the need for any kind of procedural or content help. Another perspective might provide small discrete nuggets of information from which the user may consult a single brief definition or string several together to create a tutorial.