Digital Libraries
We seek to aid designers of digital library interfaces and web sites in creating comprehensible, predictable and controllable environments for their users. Our work on interactive exploration of digital materials goes back to the early research on Hypertext in 1983 with the development of HyperTies. In our more recent projects we promote visual previews and overviews to allow users to rapidly discriminate objects of interest from those not of interest, and to more fully understand the scope and nature of a digital library.
Current Projects
International Children's Digital Library
A library that provides free access to children's books from around the world. By ensuring access to books from many cultures and in diverse languages, we foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world illiteracy.
Past Projects
Baltimore Learning Community
An electronic learning community that provides teachers with multimedia resources that are linked to outcome-oriented curriculum guidelines.
Categorized Search Results
Users can view and organize web search results using meaningful and stable hierarchies. This can help speed discovery, especially for exploratory searchs.
Dynamic Query Interfaces for the EOSDIS Information System
How to help earth scientists find the data they need.
Evaluation of the Perseus Hypermedia Corpus
One of the earliest thorough evaluations of digital libraries.
Multilingual Access to Large spoken ArCHives (MALACH)
The MALACH project's purpose is to dramatically improve access to large multilingual collections of recorded speech in oral history archives. Researchers are using Holocaust survivor testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education to test this technology.
PhotoFinder
Sustained effort to develop personal photo library browsing tools, including the patented drag-and-drop annotation tool with search capabilities.
PhotoMesa Zoomable Image Browser
A tool to support management of images through annotation, search, and a zoomable user interface to access thousands of images.
VoiceGraph Speech-Based Retrieval Interface
VoiceGraph was a user interface for retrieval of audio recordings based on automatic processing of speech contained in the recordings.
WebTOC: A Tool to Visualize and Quantify Web Sites
The table of contents of a website with indication of the amount and type of information behind each branch of the hierarchy.
