The pragmatics of information retrieval experimentation, revisited
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue on evaluation issues in information retrieval
Optimizing search by showing results in context
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
MonetDB/XQuery: a fast XQuery processor powered by a relational engine
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Is XML retrieval meaningful to users?: searcher preferences for full documents vs. elements
SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Report on the INEX 2005 interactive track
ACM SIGIR Forum
Feature- and query-based table of contents generation for XML documents
ECIR'07 Proceedings of the 29th European conference on IR research
The interactive track at INEX 2005
INEX'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval
What do users think of an XML element retrieval system?
INEX'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval
ECDL'06 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries
The interactive track at INEX 2004
INEX'04 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval
The effects of source credibility ratings in a cultural heritage information aggregator
Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Information credibility on the web
Focused Search in Digital Archives
WISE '09 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering
Proceedings of the third symposium on Information interaction in context
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Archival finding aids are long and complexly structured documents describing archival material---the paper trails of the lives of corporate bodies, persons, and families. Currently, finding aids are encoded in XML using the standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and made available to the public on web-sites of archival institutions. But how to provide access to such long and complexly structured documents? On the one hand, users tend to look for specific archival material that may be deeply nested inside the archive. On the other hand, interpreting the meaning of an item is crucially dependent on its context. Using insights from the field of XML retrieval---a subfield of information retrieval that has recently attracted a lot of attention, mainly through the annual evaluation effort in INEX---we developed three different systems for searching in collections of digital finding aids corresponding to three fundamental choices about archival access. The first system provides access to the fonds or archive as a whole; the second system provides direct access to individual archival material at any level of description; the third system retrieves archival material while preserving the original context. This paper reports on the results of an extensive user study with the three systems. Our main finding is that test persons have a preference for the third system that retrieves archival material in their original context, with test persons indicating that the system assisted them in assessing relevancy, navigation and direct access to relevant parts of the finding aids.