My field is Information Visualization, and I've applied that paradigm to
reconceptualize the tasks an OPAC should support, and the look and feel
to support them. Bungee View <http://cityscape.inf.cs.cmu.edu/bungee/>
is playful, in the sense that AquaBrowser's word cloud is playful, but
it displays hundreds of times more related terms; is more precise about
the relationship between each term and the current query; and supports
deeper exploration of those relationships -- all the way up to
statistical testing and comparing p-values if you want. It will be
familiar to users of other faceted browsers in that almost any sequence
of search or browse operations they support have exactly the same
meaning in Bungee View. In addition, multiple selection and negation are
supported (e.g. I want everything about World War I or World War II
except maps).
Exploration of term correlations enriches browsing from being solely
retrieval-oriented to enabling collection-level understanding. Patterns
in the collection may in turn reflect previously undiscovered
associations in the world among location, time, professions, social
classes, activities, cultural values, or any other characteristic
represented directly or indirectly as meta-data. I have applied Bungee
View to both Museum and Library image collections.
The default collection is the images from the American Memory
Collection. The meta-data was harvested using OAI, and the Library of
Congress bears no responsibility for the interface.
I'd love to know what you think! Or help you make your collection
available through this interface. It's open source (GPL)!
Mark Derthick
Human Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Received on Tue Aug 21 2007 - 13:47:42 EDT