Assessing Visualization Techniques for the Search Process in Digital Libraries

TL;DR

This paper reviews various visualization techniques designed to enhance the search process in digital libraries, highlighting their implementations, limitations, and the lack of real-world evaluations.

Contribution

It provides an overview of visualization methods for digital library search phases and discusses the gap between prototype development and real-world adoption.

Findings

Few visualization techniques are integrated into current DLs.

Most systems lack extensive real-life evaluation.

Many visualizations do not meet current user information needs.

Abstract

In this paper we present an overview of several visualization techniques to support the search process in Digital Libraries (DLs). The search process typically can be separated into three major phases: query formulation and refinement, browsing through result lists and viewing and interacting with documents and their properties. We discuss a selection of popular visualization techniques that have been developed for the different phases to support the user during the search process. Along prototypes based on the different techniques we show how the approaches have been implemented. Although various visualizations have been developed in prototypical systems very few of these approaches have been adapted into today's DLs. We conclude that this is most likely due to the fact that most systems are not evaluated intensely in real-life scenarios with real information seekers and that results of the interesting visualization techniques are often not comparable. We can say that many of the assessed systems did not properly address the information need of cur-rent users.