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Metadata-enhanced visual interfaces to digital librariesSchool of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta, Canada, ashiri{at}ualberta.ca Information visualization offers a variety of ways in which digital library collections can be represented on the interface and shown to the user. Metadata, a key component of solid digital libraries, has been utilized to enhance visual user interfaces to digital libraries. This paper reports on a study conducted to investigate and analyze a specific category of digital library visual interface that supports information seeking, exploration and retrieval based on metadata representations, namely metadata-enhanced visual interfaces. This study examined 21 metadata-enhanced digital library visual interfaces from the following perspectives: (a) information access and retrieval features; (b) metadata elements; (c) visualization techniques and metaphors. The results demonstrated that the combined use of visualization techniques and metaphors is becoming increasingly prevalent as a design strategy to support users' information exploration. The results also suggest that visual interfaces enhanced with metadata are becoming more widespread to provide a richer representation of digital collections.
Key Words: digital libraries information visualization metadata user interfaces visual interfaces
This version was published on December
1, 2008 Journal of Information Science, Vol. 34, No. 6,
763-775 (2008) |
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