Enabling Serendipity During Digital Library Search
Ei Ei Mon, Orland Hoeber · Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology · 2024
ABSTRACT When a serendipitous discovery is made while searching within a digital library collection (such as an academic digital library at a university), the searcher has a difficult choice to make: either pursue the serendipitous discovery or set it aside and deal with it later. If they take the first option, this breaks the flow of the primary search activity which may make it difficult to resume. If they take the second option, they may have difficulty re‐finding what they discovered when they are finished with the primary search activity. We have developed a novel search interface that includes topic‐based workspaces and a “read it later” list. Serendipitous discoveries can be easily added to the “read it later” list, allowing the searcher to stay focused on their current search activity knowing that they can easily return to the discovered resource. For each resource saved to the “read it later” list, a textual similarity is calculated against the collection of documents saved in each of the searcher's workspaces. This allows them to easily identify which of their prior search tasks is a best fit for the discovery, as well as an ability to create a new workspace if desired.