The Guides prototype demonstrates the use of narrative metaphor and anthropomorphic agents for browsing a multimedia database of early American history. The Guides are characters drawn from this period, and are explained through the use of video stories. In addition to delivering these stories, they make recommendations of database items to be browsed which are consistent with their interests. The System Guide, a contemporary figure, delivers both voice-over help information and browsing suggestions based on extrapolations of the user’s interests. Options are also available for directed search and construction of guides which represent the user’s own interests.

PREVIOUS WORK This is the third phase of an ongoing project. The first prototype, which introduced the notion of characterized gvidance, is discussed in [8]. A second version which introduced video storytelling is described in [7], and user testing results are reported in [4]. The design stance and process for the current implementation were analyzed in [6].