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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 268–273Cite as

Browsing in Digital Libraries

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Synonyms

Exploring; Surfing; Looking over/through

Definition

Informally, browsing is a process that involves looking through a collection of information. Thus, in a traditional library, one may wander about the stacks, glancing at titles of works, in regions where one expects to find interesting material. In the broadest sense, browsing is considered as one type of exploration, typically less directed or purposeful than searching, in that the goal or result is not always precisely known in advance. In the World Wide Web, this is very common, making use of “browsers” like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Sometimes the colorful term “surfing” is used when it seems appropriate to emphasize the excitement that some feel when exploring new Web content, or the thrill of getting closer to some desirable result. Yet, the WWW is but one example of a hypertext (or, if multiple media types are considered, hypermedia) environment. Accordingly, in a digital library, which many believe must include a...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Baeza-Yates R. and Ribeiro-Neto B. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1999.

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  2. Fox E.A. and Urs S.R. Digital libraries, chap. 12. In Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 36, B. Cronin (ed.); Medford, NJ, Information Today, Inc. 2002, pp. 503–589.

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  3. Fox E.A., Rous B., and Marchionini G. ACM’s hypertext and hypermedia publishing projects. In Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook, E. Berk, J. Devlin (eds.). McGraw-Hill, NY, 1991, pp. 465–467.

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  4. Goncalves M., Fox E.A., Watson L., and Kipp N. Streams, structures, spaces, scenarios, societies (5S): a formal model for digital libraries. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 22(2):270–312, 2004.

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  5. Shen R., Vemuri N., Fan W., Torres R., and Fox E.A. Exploring digital libraries: integrating browsing, searching, and visualization. In Proc. 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 2006, pp. 1–10.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

    Rao Shen

  2. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Edward A. Fox

Authors
  1. Rao Shen
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  2. Edward A. Fox
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Shen, R., Fox, E.A. (2009). Browsing in Digital Libraries. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_40

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