A user-centered interface for information exploration in a heterogeneous digital library†

The advent of the heterogeneous digital library provides the opportunity and establishes the need for the design of new user interfaces. As a single portal to a wide array of information sources, the heterogeneous digital library requires that a variety of cataloging schemas, subject domains, document genres, and institutional biases be accommodated. SenseMaker is a user-centered interface for information exploration in a heterogeneous digital library. It unifies citations and articles from heterogeneous sources by presenting them in a common schema with affordances for quick comparisons of properties. At the same time, SenseMaker users can recover a degree of context by iteratively organizing citations and articles into higher-level bundles based on either metadata or content. Furthermore, SenseMaker enables users to move fluidly from browsing to searching by introducing structure-based searching and structure-based filtering. This paper outlines the SenseMaker interface design and details some of our experimental findings surrounding its use.