Visualizing Electronic Document Repositories: Drawing Books and Papers in a Digital Library

Abstract

While methods for retrieving documents from large information repos-itories have improved a lot, presentation of the retrieved documents still leaves a lot to be desired. Important information on documents is usually presented as a textual listing of available metadata attributes such as document size, author information, date of creation, and so on. This requires the user to read and abstract from the presented meta-information. In this paper we present our lib Viewer system, a Java-Applet interfac-ing with a number of servers to provide an intuitive metaphor-graphics based representation of document repositories. Contrary to most other multidimensional data visualization approaches we rely on intuitive real-world metaphors to provide a visualization for untrained users rather than experts in special interfaces. We introduce a set of metaphors and ,present two prototype systems interfacing with Dublin Core metadata based repositories as well as the AltaVista search engine. We further provide a first usability evaluation based on comments obtained from users.