SBBrowse

Digital library (DL) support for different information seeking strategies (ISS) has not evolved as quickly as the amount of content or the quality of presentation. However, several studies argue for the support of explorative ISS alongside the directed query-response paradigm. Hence, this project presents a primarily explorative research system prototype for metadata harvesting allowing multimodal access to DL content for researchers during the research idea development phase, i.e., while the information need (IN) is vague. To address evolving INs, the prototype also allows ISS transitions, e.g., to OPACs, if accuracy is needed.

As its second contribution, the project presents a curated data set for digital humanities researchers that is automatically enriched with metadata derived by different algorithms including content-based image features. The automatic enrichment of bibliographic metadata is needed to support the exploration of large metadata corpora as traditional metadata does not always address vague INs.

This demo clearly shows that use-case-specific metadata facilitates the interaction with large metadata corpora.

When clicking the following link, make sure you run Chrome or Firefox as we deny the existence of other browsers. You should also own one of the fonts ‘Helvetica Neue’ or ‘Helvetica Light’, use a reasonably fast computer as the next page makes heavy use of JavaScript, and have a fast internet connection to quickly load a lot of images. You should also remember to click the ? if you have no idea what to do.

Enter Demo

Double-clicking a document lets you inspect a cluster. Clicking a document once makes it the current document.

Links

• Enriched metadata records (only CSV available with 98 MB before publication)
• Graphs (Publisher-Creator-Spatial-Media)
• Graphs (Generic)
• Visual similarity cluster graphs
• Normalized images
• Local features

Source code

• https://github.com/elektrobohemian/SBBrowse2018

Developed by

• David Zellhöfer