The Catalogue Browsing Access Paradigm

Catalogue browsing is a well known activity in the library world. We are all familiar with the box of cards that is used by the librarian who browsed it over in order to find the card for the book we were searching for. The Catalogue Browsing Access Paradigm (CBAP) that is suggested in this report aims at providing the users with the same feeling of the actual catalogue browsing activity while using the benefits of the digital world. 1. THE CATALOGUE BROWSING PROJECT Catalogue browsing is a well known activity in the library world. Browsing the box of cards the librarian finds the card for the book being searched for. This card contains the information that characterizes the specific book e.g., the name of the book, the name of the authors, the publisher name, the year of publication, and most important its physical location. This work focuses on one of the interaction paradigms named the Catalogue Browsing Access Paradigm (CBAP). CBAP is a non-conventional access paradigm for digital libraries (DLs) that may be effectively used in DLs to meet more sophisticated (and often neglected) user needs, going beyond traditional query-based interfaces [3]. The concept of this paradigm is to provide the users with the same feeling of the actual catalogue browsing activity while tapping into the benefits of the digital world. The relationships between the physical and the digital realms are of interest. As a basic requirement, an online catalogue should support the primary functions of a card catalogue: finding and collocation functions [8]. The online catalogue can help to better identify library entities “in terms of their nature, scope and orientation through different data fields such as intellectual level, document type, genre, language code, geographic area code and additional notes” [4]. The design of online catalogues should explore the new possibilities offered by technology to better match emerging needs and requirements of online behavior. In fact it has been argued before that online catalogues are still hard to use because they often are designed without sufficient understanding of searching behavior [2]. An assessment of the effectiveness of online catalogue design should not be based on its success in matching queries but rather by its success in answering questions. All these processes may help to disambiguate or take into account the context of a user’s information need, thus enabling her/him to find appropriate answers to a need and acquire a better understanding of knowledge structures in a certain domain. It should also be pointed out that the design of online catalogue systems has often failed to consider the social collaborative dimension of searching behavior that can be easily observed in physical libraries. An online catalogue system should provide assistance to the searcher where necessary, and follow the idea that bibliographic records serve as information "seeds" to fertilize subsequent searching [5]. The main goal of the CBAP prototype development project is to provide a seamless interaction between the physical and the digital realms in accessing library artefacts based on the concept of CBAP. The development process adopts an integration of agile principles [1] and the user-centred design methodology [7]. The interface that is developed is a speech-based mobile interface to a DL. Beyond the search activity, two additional features were defined. The first feature is enabling vocal commands for artefact searching and localization. The second feature is enabling artefact localization in the physical library using a digital positioning system. Speech input is enabled for navigating the application, and speech output is enabled for the positioning instructions. It was noted that nowadays libraries involve several kinds of artefacts like DVDs, audio and video CDs, etc. This note is significant when analyzed using the library and catalogue metaphor since as perceived by the users, the traditional setting of the library includes mainly books. 1 This report is based on our work that was accepted to IASTED-HCI, 2007. Further details about the project implementation can be found there. The first release of CBAP was performed by two developers during 4 months (from the middle of May till the beginning of September 2006) and was composed of four iterations. Customer collaboration and evaluation by users were emphasized during the process. Measures were taken to control the progress. The implementation of the CBAP prototype is performed using the Opera 8.5 browser (W3C® compliant) that supports VoiceXML and XHTML for Microsoft Windows XP systems. In addition, it provides a small screen view that enables the development for mobile applications. Figure 1 presents CBAP screenshots of the Guided Search interface (1a), Search Result interface (1b) and the Book Localization interface (1c).