The effect of collection fusion strategies on information seeking performance in distributed hypermedia digital libraries

  • Authors:

  • Michail Salampasis;John Tait

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Informatics, Technology Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece;School of Computing and Technology, University of Sunderland, Sunderland, UK

  • Venue:
  • ECDL'05 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper reports the results of a user-centered experiment which examined the effect of parallel multi-database searching using automated collection fusion strategies on information seeking performance. Three conditions were tested in the experiment. Subjects in the first condition performed search tasks in a WWW-based distributed hypermedia digital library which did not support parallel, concurrent searching of multiple collections, and did not offer any automated mechanism for source selection. Subjects in the second and the third conditions performed parallel multi-database search tasks in the same library with the support of two automated collection fusion strategies (uniform and link-based), each solving the collection fusion problem using a different approach. The results show that information-seeking performance tends to be positively affected when the eclectic link-based method was used. On the other hand, the uniform collection fusion method which treats all the sub-collections in the same manner, does not present any benefit in comparison to information seeking environments in which users must manually select sources and parallel multi-database searching is not provided.