Exploration without keywords

Abstract

As a generation of information seekers we tend to think in terms of targeted search results, yet there are some contexts in which a more exploratory behaviour might be desirable. This paper presents the design and development of a playful Web app called Bookfish that seeks to encourage exploratory behaviour amongst children wishing to discover new books. Bookfish sets out to return more open, or even unexpected, serendipitous results through using an approach designed for exploration rather than search. The paper reports on the design considerations and initial user expectations of such a system and contributes both through this discussion of design as well as the application of a novel exploration environment. Strategies for managing these design challenges are also discussed.

After serendipity strikes: Creating value from encountered information

“…Semantic addressing is designed specifically to make it easier for information seekers to find other books that may pique their interest (Svenonius, 2000). In view of this, various digital tools have emerged to attempt to facilitate IE within the limited scope of the digital library (e.g., Kleiner et al, 2013;Pearce & Chang, 2014;Thudt et al, 2012). Although these tools have not been investigated in terms of whether and how users leverage the encountered information, McCay-Peet has shown that digital tools can influence IE .…”

Tyranny of Distance: Understanding Academic Library Browsing by Refining the Neighbour Effect

“…Comparing Search and Browsing: One explanation for co-borrowing is that users may identify books individually in search and select them independently of one another. While early studies [32,33] do not support this, the increasing dominance of search [23,28] suggests that search could be responsible for these results. We created a stop-worded log-rule search index [37] for the titles of the books (the only metadata we had, but data that is frequently used in book search [11,24,38]).…”

“…Earlier work suggests browsers check 'three shelves before and after' a target book-this is something in the range of 200-500 books. This is considerably more books than are typically shown in search results, and an order of magnitude more than is shown in some nascent browsing systems [23]. Research on recommender systems has shown that a few 'unexpected' recommendations improve user experience [39].…”

“…Book browsing systems have been more common in recent research: e.g. exploiting a shelf metaphor [14]; using the non-bibliographic book features readers say they use in decision making [22], and Pearce's iFish tool [23], which creates browsing sets based on user-specified preferences. Whichbook (http://www.openingthebook.com/whichbook/) is one of a number of increasingly common commercial systems.…”

“…Search is extremely well covered by the DL literature (for a starting point see [37]); in contrast there is very little work on browsing. The existing work on browsing is very limited in terms of proposed solutions, and even where these have been proposed (for example [14,20,22,23]) they have not been adequately assessed for their effectiveness. Search effectiveness is assessed with standard metrics [37]; similar metrics do not yet exist for browsing.…”