An evaluation of thesaurus-enhanced visual interfaces for multilingual digital libraries

Authors:
Ali Shiri;Stan Ruecker;Lindsay Doll;Matthew Bouchard;Carlos Fiorentino
Affiliations:
School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta;Humanities Computing Program, University of Alberta;Faculty of Education, University of Alberta;Humanities Computing Program, University of Alberta;Department of Art and Design, University of Alberta
Venue:
TPDL'11 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Theory and practice of digital libraries: research and advanced technology for digital libraries
Year:
2011

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe a comparative user evaluation of two multilingual thesaurus-enhanced visual user interfaces, namely T-Saurus and Searchling, developed for digital libraries. The study used 25 academic users carrying out three search tasks on both user interfaces to the UNESCO digital portal, holding 400,000 documents. It applied usability and affordance strength questionnaires, interviews, thinkalouds, and direct observation to investigate users' evaluation of the key components of both user interfaces, namely multilingual features and thesaurus and search functions. The empirical data gathered will be useful for designers of search interfaces that use thesaurus and multilingual features. Results of the study show that users were able to successfully carry out the search tasks using thesaurus-enhanced search interfaces. However, they preferred Searchling for its flexible language option, thesaurus browsing and visualization.