Institute for Systems Research

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/4375

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Subject: search.filters.subject.digital library

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    Visualizing Digital Library Search Results with Categorical and Hierarchial Axes
    (1999) Shneiderman, Ben; Feldman, David; Rose, Anne; ISR
    Digital library search results are usually shown as a textual list, with 10-20 items per page. Viewing several thousand search results at once on a two-dimensional display with continuous variables is a promising alternative. Since these displays can overwhelm some users, we created a simplified two-dimensional display that uses categorical and hierarchical axes, called hieraxes. Users appreciate the meaningful and limited number of terms on each hieraxis. At each grid point of the display we show a cluster of color-coded dots or a bar chart. Users see the entire result set and can then click on labels to move down a level in the hierarchy. Handling broad hierarchies and arranging for imposed hierarchies led to additional design innovations. We applied hieraxes to a digital video library used by middle school teachers and a legal information system.
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    User Controlled Overviews of an Image Library: A Case Study of the Visible Human
    (1995) North, C.; Shneiderman, B.; Plaisant, C.; ISR
    This paper proposes a user interface for remote access of the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human digital image library. Users can visualize the library, browse contents, locate data of interest, and retrieve desired images. The interface presents a pair of tightly coupled views into the library data. The overview image provides a global view of the overall search space, and the preview image provides details about high resolution images available for retrieval. To explore, the user sweeps the views through the search space and receives smooth, rapid, visual feedback of contents. Desired images are automatically downloaded over the Internet from the library. Library contents are indexed by meta-data consisting of automatically generated miniature visuals. The interface software is completely functional and freely available for public use at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/.