A user-centered interface for information exploration in a heterogeneous digital library

✍ Scribed by Baldonado, Michelle Q. Wang

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 173 KB
• Volume: 51
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(2000)51:3<297::aid-asi8>3.0.co;2-n

✦ Synopsis

The advent of the heterogeneous digital library provides the opportunity and establishes the need for the design of new user interfaces. As a single portal to a wide array of information sources, the heterogeneous digital library requires that a variety of cataloging schemas, subject domains, document genres, and institutional biases be accommodated. SenseMaker is a user-centered interface for information exploration in a heterogeneous digital library. It unifies citations and articles from heterogeneous sources by presenting them in a common schema with affordances for quick comparisons of properties. At the same time, SenseMaker users can recover a degree of context by iteratively organizing citations and articles into higher-level bundles based on either metadata or content. Furthermore, SenseMaker enables users to move fluidly from browsing to searching by introducing structure-based searching and structure-based filtering. This paper outlines the SenseMaker interface design and details some of our experimental findings surrounding its use.