Dilex: Enabling cross-session cross-device academic digital library search

Abstract

Academic digital library searchers struggle to conduct complex search tasks that are multifaceted in nature and require multiple sessions to finish. When resuming a suspended search task, academic searchers often spend a significant amount of time reacquainting themselves with their past activities and looking for previously issued queries and saved documents. Changing devices while working on these tasks is influenced by their situation and environment. However, current academic digital library search interfaces lack the much-needed behavioural support to continue working on a complex task over a prolonged period and when changing between devices (e.g., starting a search in a mobile device and continuing it in a desktop environment). To assist academic searchers in conducting complex search tasks over multiple sessions and using multiple devices (mobile and desktop/laptop), a novel academic digital library search interface (Dilex) was designed and implemented in this research. The value of Dilex was assessed using a controlled laboratory study, comparing it with the academic digital library search interface of the University of Regina. The results of this study show that searchers were more engaged while working with Dilex, and they interacted more with previous session activities when resuming the task after a one-week gap. It further shows that participants using Dilex spent more time on the search results pages and had an increased degree of interaction with information and personalization features during the resumed tasks. Overall, the results illustrate that academic searchers were able to use the visualizations and interaction features of Dilex to resume a cross-session academic search task when transitioning from a mobile device to a desktop device in the resumed search.