Evaluating the Usefulness of Visual Features for Supporting Document Triage

One of many challenges the users of digital libraries face is the quick and easy identification of relevant documents as well as their effective use – a process which is called document triage. While there is a variety of means for supporting the actual search process in digital libraries, only few address document triage. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of user initiated support features that might assist users in this process. Therefore, we implemented SortBoard, a visual workspace for assisting document triage in a digital library for the social sciences. The results of a user study with 16 participants show that the features are highly useful for comparing and organizing documents as well as finding and examining similarities between documents.

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