A. Frank
Usability in Digital Libraries
שימושיות
בספריות דיגיטליות
אריאל פרנקמחלקה למדעי המחשב
אוניברסיטת בר-אילן[email protected]
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?• The Universal Library Challenge
• Faceted Search Paradigm
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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Traditional vs. Digital Library
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What is a Digital Library (DL)?
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What is a Digital Library (DL)? (1)
• There are dozens of definitions.
• Most are very general and verbose.
• One of the better (shorter ) ones:A managed collection of information,
with associated services, where the information is stored in digital formats and accessible over a network.
W. Y. Arms, Digital Libraries, MIT Press, 2000http://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/DigLib
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What is a Digital Library (DL)? (2)
• We will use the following DL definition:
1. Collection of Digital Objects
2. Knowledge Structures
3. Library Services
4. Library Categories: Domain, Focus & Topic
5. Quality Control
6. Preservation/Persistence
Sharon, T. & Frank, A., "Digital Libraries on the Internet", IFLA'00 66th IFLA Council and General Conference, Jerusalem, Israel, 13-18, August 2000http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla66/papers/029-142e.htm
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?• The Universal Library Challenge
• Faceted Search Paradigm
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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What is (DL) Usability ?• Jeng, Judy (2005). What is usability in the
context of the digital library and how can it be measured?, Information Technology and Libraries, 24(2), 47-56.
• Jeng, Judy (2006). An evaluation model for assessing usability of academic digital libraries, Research Forum Presentation, New Jersey Library Association.
http://web.njcu.edu/sites/faculty/jjeng/Content/default.asp
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What is Usability?• Usability is a multidimensional construct that can be
examined from various perspectives. • The term usability has been used broadly and means
different things to different people. • Many studies on usability focus on interface design. • Some relate usability to ease-of-use or user-
friendliness and consider it from an interface effectiveness point-of-view.
• This view makes sense, as usability has theoretical base in human-computer interaction.
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Attributes of Usability
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DL Usability Problems
• Digital libraries Awareness/Location problems.• Innumerable opaque digital libraries.• Endless authentication challenges.• Willfully different/complex interfaces –
intra-library and inter-library.• Insistence on attempting to suck everyone and
everything into the library site.Not the lightweight, flexible, intelligent and
responsive applications encountered online every day (Google, Amazon, Flickr, etc…).
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DL Awareness/Location Problems
• Lack of familiarity and use of DLs.
• Hard to locate/identify DLs scattered around the Web.
• DLs categories and user interfaces are not always clear/usable.
• Not enough Metadata kept for/on DLs.
• Harvesting/Indexing information in DLs.
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SELFDL – Gateway to World of DLs
Yom Tov, N. & Frank, A., Harnessing Search Engine (SEs) Technologies to raise Awareness and Discovery of Digital Libraries (DLs), Workshop on “Libraries on the Net”, Haifa University, 2 March 2006http://lib.haifa.ac.il/www/homepage/yomiyun2006/SELFDL_Presentation.pdf
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?
• The Universal Library Challenge
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?
http://www.loc.gov/
Task:browse for a digital object
LoC from 1800; 132
million items
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Browse Collections by Topic
http://memory.loc.gov/
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Technology, Industry: 13 collections
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The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers
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Subject Index
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Subjects
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Items 1 through 19 of 19
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Telegram from Alexander Graham Bell to Alexander Melville Bell
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Archival grayscale/color (JPEG - 200K)
Got to a digital object at last!!
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Alternative - Search Descriptive Information and/or Full Text
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Search Results (match any of these words )
Not Googley!!
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But has “More browse options”
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?
• The Universal Library Challenge
• Faceted Search Paradigm
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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The Universal Library Challenge
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
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The Universal Library – Library of all Libraries
• From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least:– 32 million books, 750 million articles & essays– 500 million images, 25 million songs– 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows & short films– 100 billion public Web pages
• All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world.
• When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) into 50 Petabytes (PB = 1024 TBs).
• But building a universal library is a humongous undertaking!
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So how to tie all the pieces together?
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Link/Tag/Reference Granularity
• Each word in each book can be cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.
• In the universal library, no book will be an island.
• But why just for words – imagine: books, chapters, single pages, snippets of pages, etc.
• In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
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Virtual “Bookshelves"• Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single
pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. • These snippets will be remixed into reordered books
and virtual bookshelves. • The universal library will encourage the creation of
virtual "bookshelves" – a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information.
• And as with music playlists, once created, these "bookshelves" will be published and swapped in the public commons.
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Traditional Bookshelf – Static but Visual!
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“What's New” display – Dynamic & Visual!
http://monkey.org/~emv/superpatron/aadlnewnonfiction.html
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The Internet Archive DL
• William Y. Arms, et al., A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive, Cornell University, D-Lib Magazine, 12(2), February 2006.
• The collections are some ten billion Web pages from the historical collections of the Internet Archive.
• The research library challenge is to organize the materials and provide powerful, intuitive tools that will make a huge collection of semi-structured data accessible to researchers, without demanding high levels of computing expertise.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february06/arms/02arms.html
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Architecture of how researchers use the library
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?• The Universal Library Challenge
• Faceted Search Paradigm
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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Faceted Search Paradigm?• Two Classic Web Search Paradigms:
– Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy) to enable users to browse the information space by iteratively narrowing the scope of their quest in a predetermined order.
• Exemplified by Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc.
– Direct search allows users to write their queries as words in a text box. This approach has been made enormously popular by Web search engines.
• Exemplified by Google and Yahoo! Search, etc.
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New Web Search/Browse Paradigm
• Faceted search enables users to navigate a multi-dimensional information space by combining text search with a progressive narrowing of choices in each dimension.
• It has become the prevailing user interaction mechanism in e-commerce sites and is being extended to deal with semi-structured data, continuous dimensions, and folksonomies.
http://www.searchtools.com/info/faceted-metadata.html
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Features of Faceted Search
• Displaying aspects of the current results set in multiple categorization schemes.
• Showing only populated categories, no dead-ends (links leading to empty lists).
• Displaying a count of the contents of each category, warning the user how many more choices to see.
• Generating groupings on the fly, such as size or price or date.
• Drill down by facet, so a diamond buyer could choose price, clarity, size and setting.
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Tower Records (Endeca)
– Search for your favorite artist or record title.
– You'll see a list of search results .
–You’ll also see a set of options including genre, album feature, price range, format and more.
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American Express Travel and Leisure (i411)
After doing a search, the listing shows options for the matching articles, allowing travelers to choose the one that is most likely to answer their questions.
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BeachHouse.com (Siderean)
A search for beach houses which have internet connections finds some results, and the interface allows vacationers to search/browse by the country, cost, number of bedrooms, and other criteria.
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?• The Universal Library Challenge
• Faceted Search Paradigm
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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Thinking “Outside of the Box”
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Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
hinchcliffe.org/ img/web2tree.jpg
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Web 2.0 Companies/Logos
http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss
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The Terrible Twos: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and More
http://www.infotoday.com/online/may06/OnTheNet.shtml
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Web 2.0 Concept
• The nebulous Web 2.0 concept represents a second wave of Web techniques to create more interactive and easy-to-use Web sites using new technologies (or using older technologies in a new way).
• Often used Web 2.0 examples: del.icio.us, Flickr, Listible, Writely, Yahoo! Answers, Google Maps, Meebo, and Digg.
• Web 2.0 technologies often used: Ajax, blogs, APIs, CSS, RSS, social networking, tagging, clouds, and wikis.
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Library 2.0 (L2) Concept
• Like Web 2.0, the definitions for L2 are many:1. A port of Web 2.0 concepts to the library world.
2. A desire to rethink and retool library services.
• L2 has a broad focus and has also engendered much debate:
– L2 incorporates blogs, wikis, instant messaging, RSS, and social networking into a library services setting.
– Finding new ways of involving patrons by letting them contribute comments, add tags, rate library items, and get involved in other interactive and collaborative activities.
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Contents• What is a Digital Library (DL)?
• What is (DL) Usability?
• The Library of Congress (LoC) – Usability?• The Universal Library Challenge
• Faceted Search Paradigm
• Web 2.0 & Library 2.0
• Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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Talis Whisper Demo – Usability?
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Need a Shared DL Platform!?
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Talis Whisper Site (mashup)
http://www.talis.com/tdn/whisper
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Talis’ Whisper Demonstrator (Ajax)
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Talis’ Whisper Demonstrator (L2)
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Amazon - Is the book held in a UK library?
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Talis’ Locator Map
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Talis “Library 2.0” White Papers
• Web 2.0: Building the New Library Dr. Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist, October 2005
• Do Libraries Matter? The Rise of Library 2.0 Ken Chad & Dr. Paul Miller, November 2005
• Talis Platform: Supporting the Next Generation of Applications for Delivering Rich, Library Content and Services
Dave Barker, November 2005
• Library 2.0 - The Challenge of Disruptive Innovation Dr. Paul Miller, Technology Evangelist, February 2006
• Coming together around Library 2.0 Dr. Paul Miller, D-Lib Magazine, 12/4, February 2006
http://www.talis.com/resources/index.shtml
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DL Usability? – If/all in time