Spatial hypertext and the practice of information triage

Information triage is the process of sorting through relevant materials, and organizing them to meet the needs of the task at hand. It is a practice that has become increasingly common with the advent of "at your fingertips" information resources, To explore the characteristics of information triage and its interaction with spatial hypertext, a medium we claim supports the process, we have studied subjects engaged in a time-constrained decision-making task using a large set of relevant documents. We use the study task to investigate information triage under three different conditions: one in which the participants used paper documents, and two others in which the participants used variants of VIKI, a spatial hypertext system.