Exploring Digital Libraries through Visual Interfaces

Abstract

Libraries are long standing institutions, providing an important service of making information widely available. So it is with Digital Libraries (DL), but this evolution into a computerized format does not come without its own unique challenges. The variety and quantity of information available in the digital space is truly astounding. However, as this growth continues, traditional methods for searching are becoming less effective to support the needs of users to find information quickly and easily. The conventional library book search system provides several attributes associated with books as a response to the users’ inquiry. This includes title, author, publication year, ISBN, page total, and similar information. While considering the increasing volume of data, the current text-based approach to result presentation is not an ideal solution for the modern digital environment. Particularly in the case of comparing a lengthy list of search results, this approach is ill-suited, as it is inefficient and non-intuitive (Good et al., 2005). Assistance, such as ranked results, can aid in such problems but the user will still be relied on to investigate the top results individually (Veerasamy & Heikes, 1997; Dushay, 2004). Additionally, the current popular approach of presenting a summary of content may not accurately reflect what is of value to the user. The advancements and trends that allow for the rapid growth of DL also permit more elaborate interfaces with which to access them (Bertini et al., 2005). Information Visualization is one such avenue, which has proven to be an effective approach in acquiring information from a large compilation of data. By making use of users' perceptual cognition for navigating extensive digital workspaces, their ability to understand, and speed with which they review the information space is improved (Card et al., 1999). Previous studies have proven the significance of visualization in the users’ information forage (Veerasamy & Heikes, 1997; Hawkins, 1999; Kim et al., 2002). One common approach to assist users’ search activities uses visualization techniques combined with information filtering. The users’ interaction defines the attributes of interest that easily filter out unrelated data. The following visualization procedure transforms the remaining data into graphical illustrations. FilmFinder and HomeFinder are interactive visual interfaces which assist the user to narrow down the search scope and easily compare