Search results

Undergraduate music majors often search for resources in a limited number of formats. This developed a specialized search interface which might better support the needs of undergraduate music majors. The aim of this paper is to improve music resource discovery now, without spending any additional funds.

A literature search was conducted to inform the design process. The web search capabilities of the library's existing catalog system were then used to develop a specialized music search interface. Finally, user testing was conducted to obtain qualitative feedback on the effectiveness of the new interface compared with the general‐purpose library catalog interface.

This project confirmed that an effective specialized music search interface could be created at no additional cost and with minimal effort, and that coupling a keyword search with pre‐search format limiting was an effective strategy.

The paper provides a low‐cost approach to improving music searching using tools that already exist in most ILSs.

Shortcomings in the BRS MENTOR mainframe interface and the desirability of using the workstation capabilities of the PC were factors in the decision to develop and implement a microcomputer‐based interface to the BRS software and associated databases. The Interface Design Subcommittee's charge was to design and implement the interface components for the Library Information Workstation, a microcomputer public terminal that provides access to local and remote online catalogs, periodical index databases, campus information resources, and information files stored on the microcomputer. This article focuses on the design of the interface to the BRS/SEARCH software and ancillary periodical index databases—initially Current Contents, six Wilson databases, and ERIC.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a visualized search system utilizing graphical images to represent the story elements and concepts to help elementary students describe and seek their desired storybooks; and second, to explore the effect of the proposed visualized search system on elementary students’ tactics, success, and motivation for seeking storybooks.

A quasi-experimental approach was conducted with a sample of 61 elementary students in this study. The students’ tactics, motivation and the success of their storybook searching were addressed as dependent variables for further comparisons of the visualized searching system and a conventional keyword searching system.

The results revealed that the students in the experimental group exhibited more frequent tactics and greater motivation for storybook searching than those in the control group. Further χ² analysis indicated a significant relationship between the searching interface and the success of the students’ storybook searching.

This paper proposes a new visual search approach which allows young children to search for storybooks by describing an intended storybook in terms of its characters, objects, or the background colors of the cover page. The findings provide some evidence of the effectiveness of the visualized searching interface in terms of promoting young children’s learning through storybook searching and reading activities.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

Conducting academic searches within online digital libraries can be a difficult task due to the complexity of the searcher’s information need. The interfaces for such digital libraries commonly use simple search features that provide limited support for the fundamental strategies that academic searchers employ. The authors have developed a novel visualisation interface called Bow Tie Academic Search to address some of these shortcomings, and present in this paper the findings from a user evaluation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A controlled laboratory study was conducted to compare a traditional search interface to Bow Tie Academic Search. In total, 24 graduate students were recruited to perform academic searches using the two candidate interfaces, guided by specific sub-tasks that focus on citation and keyword analysis strategies.

Although the use of the core visualisation and exploration features did not reveal differences in retrieval effectiveness or efficiency, the query refinement features were found to be effective. Strongly positive impressions of usefulness and ease of use of all aspects of the system were reported, along with a preference for using Bow Tie Academic Search for academic search tasks.

This study provides insight into the potential value for providing visual and interactive interfaces for supporting academic search tasks and strategies. While the quantitative improvements over the traditional search interface were minimal, the qualitative measures illustrate the value of Bow Tie Academic Search.

The purpose of this study was to compare the ease of use and the effectiveness of several interfaces for retrieving tagged images.

A number of participants were randomly assigned to one of four retrieval interfaces: tag search in a search box; faceted tag search in a search box; selecting terms from the tag cloud of all the tags in the database; and selecting concepts from an ontology created from the tags assigned to the images. Each interface was tested by 21 users.

The results show that the highest recall on average was achieved by users of the ontology interface, for seven out of the ten tasks, however, users were more satisfied with the textbox‐based search than the cloud or the ontology.

The experiment was rather specific, and more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings.

With the widespread use of tagging on the web it is of importance to examine whether tagging enables resource discovery. This study shows that in addition to the tags, the retrieval interface also influences user satisfaction and retrieval success.

This paper seeks to report an investigation into the ways in which end‐users perceive a thesaurus‐enhanced search interface, in particular thesaurus and search interface usability.

Thirty academic users, split between staff and postgraduate students, carrying out real search requests were observed during this study. Users were asked to comment on a range of thesaurus and interface characteristics including: ease of use, ease of learning, ease of browsing and navigation, problems and difficulties encountered while interacting with the system, and the effect of browsing on search term selection.

The results suggest that interface usability is a factor affecting thesaurus browsing/navigation and other information‐searching behaviours. Academic staff viewed the function of a thesaurus as being useful for narrowing down a search and providing alternative search terms, while postgraduates stressed the role of the thesaurus for broadening searches and providing new terms.

The paper provides an insight into the ways in which end‐users make use of and interact with a thesaurus‐enhanced search interface. This area is new since previous research has particularly focused on how professional searchers and librarians make use of thesauri and thesaurus‐enhanced search interfaces. The research reported here suggests that end‐users with varying levels of domain knowledge are able to use thesauri that are integrated into search interfaces. It also provides design implications for search interface developers as well as information professionals who are involved in teaching online searching.

Development of an effective search system and interface largely depends on usability studies. The aim of this paper is to present the results of an empirical evaluation of a prototype web site search and browsing tool based on multidimensional taxonomies derived from the use of faceted classification.

A prototype Faceted Classification System (FCS), which classifies and organizes web documents under different facets (orthogonal sets of categories), was implemented on the domain of an academic institute. Facet are created from content oriented metadata, and then assembled into multiple taxonomies that describe alternative classifications of the web site content, such as by subject and location. The search and browsing interfaces use these taxonomies to enable users to access information in multiple ways. The paper compares the FCS interfaces to the existing single‐classification system to evaluate the usability of the facets in typical navigation and searching tasks.

The findings suggest that performance and usability are significantly better with the FCS in the areas of efficient access, search success, flexibility, understanding of content, relevant search result, and satisfaction. These results are especially promising since unfamiliarity often leads users to reject new search interfaces.

The results of the study in this paper can significantly contribute to interface research in the IR community, emphasizing the advantages of multidimensional taxonomies in online information collections.

Following a general trend in software development, CDROM applications are increasingly implementing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). The general assumption is that GUIs offer advantages in terms of ease of learning and use, especially for non‐expert users. Moreover, the adoption of GUIs for CDROMs has been suggested as a means of providing a de facto standard interface. This study assesses the appropriateness of GUIs, more specifically Windows‐based interfaces for CDROM. An evaluation model was devised to carry out an expert evaluation of the interfaces of seven CDROM products. The model identified two levels of interaction, the dialogue level and task level, and focused on general interface features, search and retrieval tasks, and output and processing options as well as the help facilities. The results are discussed in the light of HCI Usability Criteria and design guidelines (including general interface design guidelines, specific Windows design guidelines and The CDROM Consistent Interface Guidelines) to assess to what extent the applications comply and appropriate recommendations are made.

The purpose of this article is to review the research on human‐computer interfaces for library‐based commercial online information retrieval (IR) systems.

The review first focuses on basic interface issues for information retrieval such as interface style, end‐user searching, query formulation, relevance feedback and browsing. The second part deals with cognitive engineering in IR including mental models and individual differences. Finally, the topics on user interface engineering are covered. These include user interface guidelines, usability evaluation methods and interface engineering techniques.

The review shows that user interface design has received a limited attention from IR researchers. There is a need for adopting human‐computer interaction (HCI) techniques into IR interface designs, but this issue has not yet been fully recognised by the commercial database vendors and distributors. The paper recommends that applying HCI techniques could help in developing more usable IR interfaces.

The review identifies the main activities of a user‐centred design methodology and suggests that IR interface designers should use this method in future. This could have major implications in IR interface design for end‐user searching.

The review is the first to offer an overview of empirical research on IR interface design and IR usability engineering. Both IR researchers and practitioners may benefit from the description of previous research and the user‐centred design advocated by the current research.