Library catalogs

As a library and information professional, I have so long searched for a nexus between the twain, viz., a) Information Visualization and b) best practices in the library world.
Based on my search, I built an extensive webliography on the above nexus. This Webliography has two related dimensions, viz.,

a) [[<a href="http://sites.google.com/site/akbanis/home/drmt_geo/visual-catalog">Alternative Cataloging / Information Visualization</a>]]

What is a Visual Catalogue?

"Current library catalogs don't reflect how people really work with information, making them very inefficient tools, particularly for users new to a discipline. They represent monolithic centralized efforts to structure access to the written record that are failing to adequately address the growth of that record or to tightly integrate newer forms of scholarly communication (e.g. the Web)." [[<a href="http://sites.google.com/site/akbanis/home/drmt_geo/visual-catalog">Read more</a> and about best practices]]

b) [[<a href="http://sites.google.com/site/akbanis/home/drmt_geo/data-mining-in-libraries">Mining The Library Catalog</a>]]

Bibliomining: Data Mining for Libraries by Dr. Scott Nicholson, Assistant Professor at Syracuse University School for Information Studies.
What is Bibliomining?
The basic definition is "data mining for libraries."
For years, bibliometrics has been used to track patterns in authorship, citation, etc. Today, there are many more tools available for discovering similar patterns in complex datasets from data mining and statistics. In addition, tools from management science such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) can be used to explore the data for patterns.
Therefore, a more complex definition is:

Bibliomining is the combination of data mining, bibliometrics, statistics, and reporting tools used to extract patterns of behavior-based artifacts from library systems. [[<a href="http://sites.google.com/site/akbanis/home/drmt_geo/data-mining-in-libraries">Read more</a>]]

I have summarized my search results. See [Information Visualization Demystified]. In this summary there are two issues. First, a few references on the involvement of some significant facilitators. And, second, how the process of developing a graphical interface for library catalog has progressed so far.
From the above citations, obvious is the fact that creating graphical interface is one of the possible ways.
In what other ways Information Visualization could aid in building a usable, and user-friendly library catalog is the crux of the problem.
How best we could apply the Guru's Visual Information-Seeking Mantra in developing next generation library catalogs is an issue, which the Guru himself may be able to guide. I hope and pray that the Guru gives a special mantra for librarians to be inspired and apply the techniques of creative visualizations.14 inch laptop backpack

One gets a lead of the probable tasks from the Guru's book: Leonardo's Laptop: Searching, Visualizing, Consulting, Thinking, Exploring, Composing, Reviewing

Library and information professionals also need insights on the above from other experts. The bottom line is every book in the library must find its user.

This research agenda begins with the following quote:

Visualization for scientific and business analysis and communication is obviously very successful.
What about Information Retrieval?
The primary task for today’s information retrieval end users is to find what they are looking for.
They type in a few words in a search box and go.
They browse one page of answers and try a new search.
Is there a Viz tool that will help them?
source: SOASIS Chapter Meeting, Southern Ohio Chapter, American Society for Information Science, Data Visualization Technology, Ray Daley, NEXIS Research and Development, 7:00 p.m. Thursday, May 18, 2000, LEXIS-NEXIS, Dayton, OH

Addtional References:

>>>>Ramana Rao, Jan O. Pedersen, Marti A. Hearst, Jock D. Mackinlay, Stuart K. Card, Larry Masinter, Per-Kristian Halvorsen and George C. Robertson. (1995). Rich Interaction in the Digital Library. Communications of the ACM, 38(4), 29-39. Abstract Effective information access involves rich interactions between users and information residing in diverse locations. Users seek and retrieve information from the sources—for example, file serves, databases, and digital libraries—and use various tools to browse, manipulate, reuse, and generally process the information. We have developed a number of techniques that support various aspects of the process of user/information interaction. These techniques can be considered attempts to increase the bandwidth and quality of the interactions between users and information in an information workspace—an environment designed to support information work. Card, S.K. (1996). Visualizing Retrieved Information: A Survey. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 16(2), 63-67. .pdf available from IEEE Digital Library, Stuart K. Card, Xerox PARC
>>>>BibRelEx: Exploring Bibliographic Databases by Visualization of Annotated Content-Based Relations, by Anne Brüggemann-Klein, Technische Universität München, Germany, brueggem@informatik.tu-muenchen.de; Rolf Klein, FernUniversität Hagen, Germany, rolf.klein@fernuni-hagen.de; and Britta Landgraf, FernUniversität Hagen, Germany, britta.landgraf@fernuni-hagen.de. Abstract Traditional searching and browsing functions for bibliographic databases no longer enable users to deal efficiently with the rapidly growing number of scientific publications. The main goal of our project BibRelEx is to develop a new method based on the visualization of content-based relations between documents such as cites, succeeds, improves with respect to. BibRelEx will therefore use these relationships for effective exploration. In addition, BibRelEx will take advantage of the additional insights into the area that can result from the aggregation of expert knowledge, which complements the specialized knowledge represented in the documents themselves. We are preparing to test this approach using a bibliographic database in a specific area of computer science.
>>>>Case Study: A Combined Visualization Approach for WWW-Search Results, by Thomas M. Mann, Harald Reiterer Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Germany. Abstract: The idea of Information Visualization is to get insights into great amounts of abstract data. Especially document sets found by searching the World Wide Web are a special challenge. The paper gives a short overview on the variety of possible visualizations for this application area. Crucial factors for the success of visualizations are discussed. A combined approach is presented to use alternative simple visualizations, grouped around the traditional result-list, for usage with a local meta web search engine.

>>>>Evaluation of a Tool for Visualization of Information Retrieval Results (1996), Aravindan Veerasamy (veerasam@himalaya.cc.gatech.edu) and Nicholas J. Belkin (belkin@scils.rutgers.edu). Abstract:We report on the design and evaluation of a visualization tool for Information Retrieval (IR) systems that aims to help the end user in the following respects:

• As an indicator of document relevance, the tool graphically provides specific query related information about individual documents

• As a diagnosis tool, it graphically provides aggregate information about the query results that could help in identifying how the different query terms influence the retrieval and ranking of documents.

Two different experiments using TREC-4 data were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this tool. Results, while mixed, indicate that visualization of this sort may provide useful support for judging the relevance of documents, in particular by enabling users to make more accurate decisions about which documents to inspect in detail. Problems in evaluation of such tools in interactive environments are discussed.