Integrated Faceted Browser and Direct Search to Enhance Information Retrieval in Text-Based Digital Libraries

Abstract

Browsing and searching are two prominent paradigms in information retrieval. As digital libraries grow in size and types of collections, their user bases are expanding and include more non-expert users. For those who are not familiar with what the content of a specific text-based digital collection is or its data structure, the browse functionality offers the entry point to explore and obtain an overview. In current digital library implementations, exploratory browsing is sometimes not available as an option. When offered, it is commonly presented as an alphabetical listing of chosen categories depending on the scope of the digital collections. Studies have revealed that information seekers feel fatigued easily and that they are willing to scan at most 200 items of citations in electronic environments. In addition, when users are ready to search with a specific query during the browsing activity, they have to switch to another information space where the search box is separated from the browsing lists. A consequence of such design is that users have to toggle back and forth between browsing and searching states.Within this context, faceted navigation has been discussed and a conceptual model of an integrated faceted browser and direct search utilizing faceted navigation for text-based digital libraries is also proposed in this research. A faceted browser provides users with many entry points at first glance which enable them to receive an overview of the content of the digital libraries effectively and efficiently. A faceted browser integrated with iv direct search ensures the switching between browsing and searching seamlessly. While searching, users are able to work with the recognized structure of the collection right from the browsing overview. An experiment was conducted to test five hypotheses derived from the conceptual model of the integrated faceted browser and direct search for text-based digital libraries. The experiment results show that four hypotheses are supported. For both browsing and searching approaches in information retrieval in a textbased digital library, compared to an alphabetical browser, the faceted browser can significantly improve the effectiveness by (30.8%, p = 0.015) and efficiency by (11.3%, p = 0.001) of information retrieval. Also, compared to un-integrated alphabetical browser with direct search interfaces, the integrated faceted browser with direct search interfaces can significantly improve the effectiveness in information retrieval by (35.7%, p = 0.03) and bring users greater satisfaction (by 34.8%, p < 0.03) with the process.

Study of User Search Activities With Two Discovery Tools at an Academic Library

“…The unified metadata consist of facets, which Wynar and Taylor (1992) defined as mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive properties of information items (e.g., books, journals, articles, etc.). With the utilization of faceted browsing and searching, users can achieve higher task accuracy and satisfaction than traditional direct search (Yeh & Liu, 2011). Because of these potential advantages of discovery tools over traditional library catalogs, the number of libraries in a sample of 260 academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada employing discovery tools has doubled from 2010 to 2012, increasing from 16% to 29% (Hofmann & Yang, 2012).…”

INVISQUE as a Tool for Intelligence Analysis: The Construction of Explanatory Narratives

“…In the field of document analysis, examples of system-structured spaces include scatter plots (Ahlberg & Shneiderman, 1994;Kang, Grg, & Stasko, 2010), clustering based on latent semantic analysis or similar (Russell, Slaney, Qu, & Houston, 2006;Gregory, Payne, McColgin, Cramer, & Love, 2007;Kang et al, 2010), and 3D data terrains (Wise et al, 1995). Interaction typically involves filtering large datasets (Yeh & Liu, 2011) to reveal trends and relationships that are within the data or are found through the application of analytics.…”

eTACTS: A method for dynamically filtering clinical trial search results

“…In particular, the resulting trials are indexed through a small number of facets, each defining a distinct property of the text, and users can select facets to filter the search results [12–15]. eTACTS defines eligibility tags as facets for the clinical trial search results.…”