Studies of online search behaviour have found that searchers often face difficulties formulating queries and exploring the search results sets. These shortcomings may be especially problematic in digital libraries since library searchers employ a wide variety of information-seeking methods (with varying degrees of support ), and the corpus to be searched is often more complex than simple textual information. To address these problems, an interactive Web-based library search interface is present ed, which has been designed to support strategic retrieval behaviour of library searchers. T his system takes advantage of the rich metadata associated with academic documents and employs information visualization techniques to provide searchers with additional information-seeking tools. These tools are designed to facil itat e visual and interactive query refinement, search results exploration, and citation navigation. User evaluations illustrate the potential benefits of the design choices in comparison to a list-based digital library search interface.
Acknowledgeme ntsFirstly, I would like t o sincerely t hank my supervisor , Dr. Orland Roeb er , for the support and guidance he offered me t hroughout my master 's program . This research would not have been possible without his insight ful advice and patient encouragement.