Tuesday 23rd September 2025 - 11:00 Speaker: Orland Hoeber (University of Regina)Title: The Design and Study of Search Interfaces to Enable Exploratory Search within Academic Digital LibrariesAbstract: When academic searchers are faced with complex information needs that are ambiguous, multi-faeted, or open-ended, simple search strategies that are tuned for information look-up or fact verification may not be sufficient. Exploratory search has been proposed as a more suitable strategy for such situations (White & Roth, 2009), wherein searchers start with an exploratory browsing style of searching, and as their uncertainty in what they are seeking reduces, they transition to focused searching. While the concept of this model is attractive, there remains limited support for exploratory search activities within the search interfaces provided by academic digital libraries.The search interfaces provided for academic digital libraries are typically based on design patterns that are optimized for simple search tasks (a simple query box and search results list). Some academic digital library search interfaces have started to include features that are a step forward in supporting exploratory search, such as faceted navigation and workspaces. However, more research is needed to study the various ways in which exploratory search can be encouraged and enabled within the search interface.In this talk, an overview of the presenter’s recent work on designing and studying interfaces that enable exploratory search within academic digital libraries will be presented, including a set of design principles (Hoeber, 2025), an approach for supporting cross-session and cross-device search (Gomes, Boon, & Hoeber, 2022), methods for using keywords to highlight related search results (Hoeber & Shukla, 2022; Hoeber et al., 2024), and an approach for tagging search results as they are saved to a workspace (Pirmoradi & Hoeber, 2024). An outline of in-progress and future research projects will also be provided, including work to support searching within public libraries and digital humanities archives, supporting serendipity, and assisting searchers with dyslexia.Biography: Dr. Orland Hoeber is a Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina (Canada), and co-founder of Dilex Search. His primary research interest is at the intersection of interactive information retrieval and information visualization. He has an active research team working on the design, development, and study of visual and interactive software to support exploration, analysis, reasoning, and discovery in a broad range of information-centric domains. His most recent research has focused on supporting exploratory search within academic and public digital libraries (funded by NSERC Discovery and Alliance Grants) and digital humanities archives (funded by an NSERC Alliance International Catalyst Grant).Dr. Hoeber was Program Co-Chair for the 2020 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), the top academic conference at the intersection of information retrieval and human-computer interaction. He is a regular senior program committee member for CHIIR and program committee member for SIGIR, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Sep 23 2025 11.00 - 12.00 Tuesday 23rd September 2025 - 11:00 Speaker: Orland Hoeber (University of Regina) Note unusual location: Bayes Theorem (previously G.03)
Tuesday 23rd September 2025 - 11:00 Speaker: Orland Hoeber (University of Regina)Title: The Design and Study of Search Interfaces to Enable Exploratory Search within Academic Digital LibrariesAbstract: When academic searchers are faced with complex information needs that are ambiguous, multi-faeted, or open-ended, simple search strategies that are tuned for information look-up or fact verification may not be sufficient. Exploratory search has been proposed as a more suitable strategy for such situations (White & Roth, 2009), wherein searchers start with an exploratory browsing style of searching, and as their uncertainty in what they are seeking reduces, they transition to focused searching. While the concept of this model is attractive, there remains limited support for exploratory search activities within the search interfaces provided by academic digital libraries.The search interfaces provided for academic digital libraries are typically based on design patterns that are optimized for simple search tasks (a simple query box and search results list). Some academic digital library search interfaces have started to include features that are a step forward in supporting exploratory search, such as faceted navigation and workspaces. However, more research is needed to study the various ways in which exploratory search can be encouraged and enabled within the search interface.In this talk, an overview of the presenter’s recent work on designing and studying interfaces that enable exploratory search within academic digital libraries will be presented, including a set of design principles (Hoeber, 2025), an approach for supporting cross-session and cross-device search (Gomes, Boon, & Hoeber, 2022), methods for using keywords to highlight related search results (Hoeber & Shukla, 2022; Hoeber et al., 2024), and an approach for tagging search results as they are saved to a workspace (Pirmoradi & Hoeber, 2024). An outline of in-progress and future research projects will also be provided, including work to support searching within public libraries and digital humanities archives, supporting serendipity, and assisting searchers with dyslexia.Biography: Dr. Orland Hoeber is a Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina (Canada), and co-founder of Dilex Search. His primary research interest is at the intersection of interactive information retrieval and information visualization. He has an active research team working on the design, development, and study of visual and interactive software to support exploration, analysis, reasoning, and discovery in a broad range of information-centric domains. His most recent research has focused on supporting exploratory search within academic and public digital libraries (funded by NSERC Discovery and Alliance Grants) and digital humanities archives (funded by an NSERC Alliance International Catalyst Grant).Dr. Hoeber was Program Co-Chair for the 2020 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR), the top academic conference at the intersection of information retrieval and human-computer interaction. He is a regular senior program committee member for CHIIR and program committee member for SIGIR, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Sep 23 2025 11.00 - 12.00 Tuesday 23rd September 2025 - 11:00 Speaker: Orland Hoeber (University of Regina) Note unusual location: Bayes Theorem (previously G.03)
Sep 23 2025 11.00 - 12.00 Tuesday 23rd September 2025 - 11:00 Speaker: Orland Hoeber (University of Regina)
