Visually Linked Keywords to Support Exploratory Browsing

Academic digital library searchers often employ exploratory search strategies when faced with the complex search task of finding academic literature on a topic that is new to them. Unfortunately, the interfaces employed by academic digital libraries provide little support for exploratory browsing, which is a critical first step in exploratory search. To address this shortcoming, we have designed and implemented a novel academic digital library interface (KLink Search) with two new features: visually linked keywords and an interactive workspace. Here, we present preliminary analysis of data collected in a controlled laboratory study (n=32) comparing KLink Search to a baseline interface. Participants reported higher degrees of usefulness, ease-of-use, satisfaction, and knowledge gain after using KLink Search. Participants spent more time on the search tasks, and were able to collect sets of documents that were highly relevant to the tasks. Results from this research illustrate the value of adding lightweight visual and interactive features to academic digital library search interfaces to support exploratory browsing.