Exploring Web-based Visual Interfaces for Searching Research Articles on Digital Library Systems

Previous studies that present information archived in digital libraries have used either document meta-data or document content. The current search mechanisms commonly return text-based results that were compiled from the meta-data without reflecting the underlying content. Visual analytics is a possible solution for improving searches by presenting a large amount of information, including document content alongside meta-data, in a limited screen space. This paper introduces a multi-tiered visual interface for searching research articles stored in Digital Library systems. The goals of this system are to allow users to find research papers about their interests in a large work space, to see how document content relates to a search terms, and to refine their search queries using document content. The current, under development pilot system successfully presents graphical illustrations of search results produced from both meta-data and underlying content in an intuitive visual interface that will assist user’s search activities. With minor modification, the proposed system can be applied to a variety of other text-based data repositories.