Archeological research embracing complex Information Technology techniques can result in vast quantities of heterogeneous information from different sites in different formats. ETANA-DL is an Archeological Digital Library (DL), providing services suited for the archeological domain. With a growing collection of records in the DL, it is a challenge to present them in an organized and meaningful way.
We have designed a new visual browsing interface called ETANA-CMV that aims to provide users a richer and more insightful browsing experience. ETANA-CMV allows users to navigate through the records in ETANA-DL that are multidimensional, hierarchical, and categorical in nature. ETANA-CMV was designed to be scalable, flexible, and easy to learn.
This interface employs a data cube based browsing index to counter performance issues that usually limit the interactivity of visual browsing interfaces to DLs. The interface has been integrated with the existing Browse Interface and the search service in ETANA-DL. Formative evaluation of the new visual interface led to several improvements in the interface. It appears that users were able to detect trends in the DL collections more accurately using visualization based strategies than with the existing textual browse interface.
