Use of Subimages in Fish Species Identification: A Qualitative Study

Many scholarly tasks involve working with subdocuments, or contextualized fine-grain information, i.e., with information that is part of some larger unit. A digital library (DL) facil- itates management, access, retrieval, and use of collections of data and metadata through services. However, most DLs do not provide infrastructure or services to support working with subdocuments. Superimposed information (SI) refers to new information that is created to reference subdocu- ments in existing information resources. We combine this idea of SI with traditional DL services, to define and develop a DL with SI (SI-DL). We explored the use of subimages and evaluated the use of a prototype SI-DL (SuperIDR) in fish species identification, a scholarly task that involves work- ing with subimages. The contexts and strategies of working with subimages in SuperIDR suggest new and enhanced sup- port (SI-DL services) for scholarly tasks that involve working with subimages, including new ways of querying and search- ing for subimages and associated information. The main contribution of our work are the insights gained from these findings of use of subimages and of SuperIDR (a prototype SI-DL), which lead to recommendations for the design of digital libraries with superimposed information