eBook meets tabletop: using collaborative visualization for search and serendipity in on-line book repositories

The ever-growing amount of digitized books and electronically published documents necessitates proper tools to search and explore such large digital information spaces. This paper presents the design of an interactive prototype for collaborative visual information seeking (VIS) in an on-line book repository. The main objectives of the prototype are a visual metaphor to query an on-line book repository and the facilitation of back-and-forth comparison of search results. Furthermore, an integrated cosine similarity search encourages for serendipitous discoveries while browsing through an information space.