International Workshop on Supporting User’s Exploration on Digital Libraries

Browsing allows an information seeker to find what they did not know they needed or what they could not articulate in the form of a keyword query. As such it is a mode of discovery which could work very well within the extremely heterogeneous Europeana repository. This is especially important as user studies indicate that many Europeana users consider the Europeana portal to not provide clear enough information on the scope and type of content thus making their initial searches difficult to articulate. In this presentation I will elaborate more on the opportunities and challenges of developing browse functions in the Europeana portal. I will touch upon a number of different forms of browsing, the opportunities they offer to users and the challenges of implementing them in the Europeana portal. The browsing types considered will be search with guided navigation, spatio-temporal browsing, subject browsing, tours/paths browsing and similarity browsing. Mockups and wireframes will be used throughout to illustrate the possible implementations. While the presentation will focus on Europeana the principles should be applicable to any repository discovery service comprising cross-domain and multi-lingual content.