Dynamically growing hypertext collections

Many approaches have been pursued over the years to facilitate creating, organizing, and sharing collections of materials extracted from large information spaces. Little attention, in the context of hypertext collections, has been paid to the addition of new materials to these collections over time. Traditionally, human maintainers manually incorporate new materials into existing collections as they appear in the underlying network. In this paper we address the issues involved in supporting the creation and maintenance of dynamically growing hypertextual collections. We describe a prototype implementation for automatically including additional, relevant materials into Web-based collections. Our prototype uses the metaphor of hypertextual paths, a proven technique for layering metastructure atop existing hypertextual materials, which is particularly well suited to accommodating growing collections.