Reuse facilities help people to recall and modify their earlier activities and re-submit them to the computer. This paper examines such mechanisms for reuse. First, guidelines for building reuse facilities are summarized.
Second, existing reuse facilities are surveyed under four main headings:
history systems, adaptive systems, programming by example, and explicit customization. The first kind relies on temporally ordered lists of interactions, the second builds statistical dynamic models of past activities and uses them to expedite future interaction, the third collects and generalizes more extensive sequences of activities for future reuse, while in the fourth the user collects items of interest explicitly.
Third, the paper presents WORKBENCH, a reuse facility that uses an empirically-derived history system as a way of capturing and organizing one's situated activities. An appendix reports a study of a widely-available history system, the UNIX \fIcsh\fR, and explains why it is poorly used in practice.