Evaluating Digital Libraries: A Longitudinal and Multifaceted View

published or submitted for publicatio

ImageSieve: Exploratory search of museum archives with named entity-based faceted browsing

Over the last few years, faceted search emerged as an attractive alternative to the traditional "text box" search and has become one of the standard ways of interaction on many e-commerce sites. However, these applications of faceted search are limited to domains where the objects of interests have already been classified along several independent dimensions, such as price, year, or brand. While automatic approaches to generate faceted search interfaces were proposed, it is not yet clear to what extent the automatically-produced interfaces will be useful to real users, and whether their quality can match or surpass their manually-produced predecessors. The goal of this paper is to introduce an exploratory search interface called ImageSieve, which shares many features with traditional faceted browsing, but can function without the use of traditional faceted metadata. ImageSieve uses automatically extracted and classified named entities, which play important roles in many domains (such as news collections, image archives, etc.). We describe one specific application of ImageSieve for image search. Here, named entities extracted from the descriptions of the retrieved images are used to organize a faceted browsing interface, which then helps users to make sense of and further explore the retrieved images. The results of a user study of ImageSieve demonstrate that a faceted search system based on named entities can help users explore large collections and find relevant information more effectively

A comparison of Boolean-based retrieval to the WAIS system for retrieval of aeronautical information

An evaluation of an information retrieval system using a Boolean-based retrieval engine and inverted file architecture and WAIS, which uses a vector-based engine, was conducted. Four research questions in aeronautical engineering were used to retrieve sets of citations from the NASA Aerospace Database which was mounted on a WAIS server and available through Dialog File 108 which served as the Boolean-based system (BBS). High recall and high precision searches were done in the BBS and terse and verbose queries were used in the WAIS condition. Precision values for the WAIS searches were consistently above the precision values for high recall BBS searches and consistently below the precision values for high precision BBS searches. Terse WAIS queries gave somewhat better precision performance than verbose WAIS queries. In every case, a small number of relevant documents retrieved by one system were not retrieved by the other, indicating the incomplete nature of the results from either retrieval system. Relevant documents in the WAIS searches were found to be randomly distributed in the retrieved sets rather than distributed by ranks. Advantages and limitations of both types of systems are discussed

Investigation of behavior and perception of digital library users: A cognitive style perspective

Cognitive style is an influential factor in users’ information seeking. The study presented in this paper examines how users’ cognitive styles affect their behavior and perception in digital libraries. Fifty participants took part in this study. Two dimensions of cognitive styles were considered: (a) Field Dependence/Independence; (2) Verbalizer/Imager. The results showed that Intermediate users and Verbalizers have not only more positive perception, but they also complete the tasks in effective ways. Implications for the design of personalized digital libraries are also discussed

Category-Based and Association-Based Map Displays by Human Subjects

Visual displays are important for information retrieval. A good visual display should not only help the viewer to see and sense the information, but also abstract and present the semantic structure of the underlying information to facilitate searching and browsing. Depending on the type of structures shown on the display, visual displays for information retrieval can be classified as hierarchical displays, network displays, scatter displays, and map displays (LiD, 1993)

Content-Based Video Retrieval in Historical Collections of the German Broadcasting Archive

The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 hours of GDR television recordings.Comment: TPDL 2016, Hannover, Germany. Final version is available at Springer via DO

A preliminary social network analysis of MPACT

The dissertation author and committee relationships in the MPACT dataset were modeled as social networks. Exploratory network analysis was performed primarily on the network composed of dissertation advisors and advisees to investigate the utility of structural prestige for measuring mentoring impact. Three prestige measures were investigated: 1) outdegree, 2) output domain, and 3) proximity prestige. All three measures were highly correlated when computed across the entire dataset, but correlation was lower for those scoring in the top 25 of any of the three. Correlation with citation ranking was low for this subset.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61331/1/1450440379_ftp.pd