Contexts.

The Digital Library North project has been designed with a number of different research contexts in mind. The following pages outline these contexts in detail.

Digital Libraries ~ Metadata ~ Information Needs ~ Cultural Heritage ~ Multilingual User Interfaces ~ User Evaluation ~ Community-Driven Research ~ Partnerships ~ Bibliography

Multilingual User Interfaces.

Visual interfaces to digital libraries have recently found widespread attention due to their critical role in information exploration (Wan, 2006). Börner and Chen (2002) identify three usage scenarios for visual interfaces: 1) support the identification of the composition of a retrieval result, understand the interrelation of retrieved documents to one another, and refine a search; 2) gain an overview of the coverage of a digital library and facilitate browsing; and 3) visualize user interaction data in relation to available documents in order to evaluate and improve digital library usage. Zaphiris et al. (2004) explore the application, and identify three key tasks for digital libraries, namely searching, browsing and navigation to which information visualization can make a contribution. It has been clearly demonstrated through research that requirements for multilingual interfaces differ between cultures (Wu et al. 2012) and provide various and important access points. Given the multilingual nature of the ISR, the digital library should provide multilingual interfaces (Wu et al. 2012) as necessary, based on the environmental scan. There have been some developments with regard to multilingual interfaces for aboriginal collections. For example, the Inuit Adventure website and the Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute provide multilingual access to content. Open source applications have embraced the value and importance of multilingual access. For instance, Greenstone (open source software), supports metadata and content in many different languages (Nichols et al. 2005). This study will investigate the specifications for a multilingual user interface suitable for the proposed digital library.