Improving CADAL Portal Usability: Book Search, Reading, Reporting Services

CADAL has been open to the public for more than two years. We have received a lot of positive feedbacks to improve the usability of CADAL portal. In this paper, we present our works in improving the usability of book search, reading and reporting services in CADAL portal. First, we present a quick book search application whose effective hybrid ranking mechanism combines content similarities with reading tendencies mined from book clickthrough logs. Second, we utilize Ajax and Flex technologies to improve user experiences of book search, reading and reporting services. Moreover, the use of Flex framework in the book reading service helps in preventing automatic batch downloading of books. Finally, Flex-based book reporting service makes administrators easily learn the hottest books, reading patterns of users and possible crawlers. The actual operation of those services shows that log mining and Flex technologies indeed improve the usability of CADAL portal.