Personalization of Search Results Representation of a Digital Library

Abstract

The process of discovering appropriate resources in digital libraries within universities is important, as it can have a big effect on whether retrieved works are useful to the requester. The improvement of the user experience with the digital library of the University of Novi Sad dissertations (PHD UNS) through the personalization of search results representation is the aim of the research presented in this paper. There are three groups of PHD UNS digital library users: users from the academic community, users outside the academic community, and librarians who are in charge of entering dissertation data. Different types of textual and visual representations were analyzed, and representations which needed to be implemented for the groups of users of PHD UNS digital library were selected. After implementing these representations and putting them into operation in April 2017, the user interface was extended with functionality that allows users to select their desired style for representing search results using an additional module for storing message logs. The stored messages represent an explicit change in the results representation by individual users. Using these message logs and ELK technology stack, we analyzed user behavior patterns depending on the type of query, type of device, and search mode. The analysis has shown that the majority of users of the PHD UNS system prefer using the textual style of representation rather than the visual. Some users have changed the style of results representation several times and it is assumed that different types of information require a different representation style. Also, it has been established that the most frequent change to the visual results representation occurs after users perform a query which shows all the dissertations from a certain time period and which is taken from the advanced search mode; however, there is no correlation between this change and the client’s device used.