Visual interfaces to digital libraries: the first international workshop at the first ACM+IEEE joint conference on digital libraries

Today’s digital libraries are content rich, multimedia, multilingual collections that are distributed and accessed worldwide. Digital libraries’ interfaces are playing a crucial role in helping users to achieve an easy and effective access to the information that they need. Visual interfaces represent one of the most exciting areas of research and development in digital libraries. Visual interfaces to digital libraries aim to reduce the user’s cognitive load by capitalizing on our powerful perceptual abilities. Research in visual interfaces has a strong connection to the fast-moving field of Information Visualization. Information Visualization Information visualization is interdisciplinary in nature, involving computer graphics, electronic engineering, information systems, geography, information science, just to name a few. It has been seen to have a tremendous potential of improving the way we access, process, and manage information. Information Visualization is a process of transforming and representing a wide variety of data, especially non-spatial and non-numerical data, in a visual form so as to help users to understand the information. It uses computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of