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Exploring Digital Libraries through Visual Interfaces

InTech eBooks2011

Citations Over TimeTop 13% of 2011 papers

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 Assistance, such as ranked results, can aid in such problems but the user will still be relied on to investigate the top results individually 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 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 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 www.intechopen.com Digital Libraries -Methods and Applications 124 results using the visualization Another common approach focuses on presenting the underlying information through visualization. A novel text visualization interface, TileBars, shows the distribution behavior of a set of query terms This presentation allows users to compare multiple documents compactly and concurrently. Other visualization techniques in this category concentrate on showing a portion of the information at a great level of detail while maintaining the overall structure of the information Information clustering is another method for supporting navigation of a large data collection. Related documents are clustered together, whose notable characteristics are visualized using a mixture of attributes Visualization methodologies, such as those mentioned here, have shown that the illustration of data has contributed to improving the user's ability to comprehend information quickly. This, in turn, leads to increased speed and accuracy in finding desired information (Card et al., 1999; We can apply these kinds of visual abstractions to enhance searches on different types of data domains. By presenting information in such a way, a large amount of content can be displayed in a format which is more intuitive. This has the benefit of allowing the user to analyze data more effectively, increasing the user's ability to comprehend results and make better content selections. Periscope, for example, is a visualization system targeted at web search results. It provides a series of different visualizations which users can utilize to analyze and explore the result set. A holistic interface can be used to organize documents into various categories, such as language and format, or web related attributes such as DNS domains. An analytical interface allows for up to seven attributes to be relayed at a time, through use of X, Y, Z axes, color, size, shape, and animation (Wiza et al., 2004). The search based on the underlying content will increase the accuracy in finding targeted information from the available resources. Think for a moment how one might search a physical book for a topic of interest. The logical place to start would be the index. Indexes are valuable resources for referencing major terms which appear in a book. The categorical and hierarchical layout of terms in the index allows us to identify associated topics easily, along with their relationships without reading the underlying contents. The page numbers coupled with each entry makes it possible to estimate the amount information relating to a particular subject. The index will represent the overall layout of entire book contents. Due to a lack of readily available sources, this valuable information has been under utilized. The current trend of digitizing books in recent years allows us to exploit content in searches, instead of just depending on superficial book attributes. The visualization techniques utilizing this information will further enhances the user's search on the DL system. The main objective of this book chapter is on the utilization of visualization techniques for exploring the DL system. The following chapter will survey and summarize various visualization approaches which applied to DL. We will introduce a visual interface which presents general book information through iconic representations. This chapter also proposes a novel visualization which utilizes the book index for mimicking the content analysis. It will allow for detailed comparison of index-based information between selected works. Two different visualizations for this detail view are implemented, each with different strengths. The procedure and analysis of results for a usability test follow, along with discussion and future possibilities, and final conclusions.

Citations Over TimeTop 13% of 2011 papers

Abstract

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