A metaphor graphics based representation of digital libraries on the World Wide Web: using the libViewer to make metadata visible

While methods for searching large digital libraries have experienced tremendous improvements recently, interfaces to such collections still have a far way to go. Most interfaces to digital libraries present themselves as various forms of sorted lists, providing metadata information on the documents in textual form. This prohibits intuitive understanding of document archives or Web search results. We present the libViewer, a Java-based user interface to digital libraries using metaphor graphics to display information on the elements in a digital library in an intuitively understandable way. Metadata on digital libraries based on the Dublin Core Initiative is mapped onto a set of metaphors to allow instant recognition and orientation in an unknown document collection, facilitating interactive retrieval and exploration.