Peter Bergström and Darren C. Atkinson, “Augmenting the Exploration of Digital Libraries with Web-Based Visualizations,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Digital Information Management, November, 2009.
Abstract
Web-based digital libraries have sped up the process that scholars use to find new, important research papers. Unfortunately, current digital libraries are limited by their inadequate webpage-based paradigm, and it is easy for even the most experienced scholar to get lost. A paper and its immediate references are shown on a webpage, but it is not obvious where that paper belongs in the larger context of a field of research. The goal for our research was to develop and test the effectiveness of a web-based application, PaperCube, that was designed to augment a scholar’s interaction with a digital library and explore bibliographic meta data using a defined set of visualizations. These visualizations needed to provide different levels of visibility into a paper’s citation network without losing focus of the currently viewed paper. PaperCube was validated through a user study which showed that it was very useful when it comes to augmenting digital library search by reducing the “cognitive load” put on a scholar and aiding the “discoverability” of new research material.
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