EBSCO Partners with Groxis for Visual Database Searching

One of the coolest new products on view at the American Library Association's recent Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio was a visual spin on searching EBSCO databases. EBSCO has joined with Groxis, a top provider of visual search applications, to add those features to EBSCOhost. The Grokker (yes, it is borrowed from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land) visual search feature lets users search for data and get results in a graphical results map. The company claims to be the first heavyweight content aggregator to offer such a feature.

Clues to the map

LJ went one-on-one with EBSCO Publishing's senior VP and chief information officer Michael Gorrell for an in-depth look at how Grokker works. At its most elemental, Grokker “provides users an alternative to our Basic or Advanced search mechanisms,” Gorrell said. When users enter search terms, instead of getting a textual results list with ten results per page as they would on Basic/Advanced, they get a Grokker map. “This map is a series of circles representing the results from their search—each circle labeled as a topic,” said Gorrell. “The circles are sized according to how many results relate to its topic.”

Users can zoom in by clicking on a circle, causing it to expand and in turn paint more circles (deeper related topics) or squares (actual articles). Users can mouse over a square to see a mini­citation. “If they click on the square, the detailed view of the article (and then the full text if they choose) appears in a pane on the right side of the screen,” Gorrell said.

Additionally, he said, users can “dynamically adjust the map by using filters on the interface—for example, by selecting the Full Text Only checkbox the map dynamically paints, reflecting only those articles with full text. There's a date slider that's also very intuitive—the slider starts on the left with the earliest result, and you can drag it to the right (end point being the most recent article), and the map dynamically repaints. It's very cool.” Also cool is an online tutorial.

Different from AquaBrowser

To select items for grouping, EBSCO tuned the Grokker engine to build the map based on the 250 most relevant articles. It selects the top ten topics by analyzing the text of each result, heavily weighting EBSCO's subject headings. “More than likely, the topics will be subject headings,” Gorrell said. “Because the map is created dynamically, we needed to find the sweet spot in terms of performance. During development, we saw the differences between looking at all the results from a query and the top 250 results were statistically insignificant in terms of topic selection.”

Although the description of Grokker initially might sound like AquaBrowser, Gorrell insists that Grokker delivers a richer visual experience. But with Grokker, said Gorrell, “the grouping of results into topic-labeled circles is very intuitive, and being able to see inside each circle to know what's there provides users with clues that help them explore results further. The filtering capability that provides the dynamic map repainting really cements users' understanding of what the map is telling them.”

Grok on

Gorrell asserts that Grokker is the first tool that truly helps users manage their search results. “It allows users to interact with the results of their search in a way that traditional list views can't. They are able to see conceptual relationships that help them understand their topic without actually reading articles. It allows the user to comprehend what's behind that first page of results—something they can't do in the traditional list view until they click from page to page.” He said that down the road there will be more Grokking within EBSCOhost, such as tighter integration with the other features.

Free LISTA access

EBSCO additionally is making its LISTA (Library Information Science & Technology Abstracts) database available free at www.LibraryResearch.com. LISTA includes indexing and abstracts for more than 600 periodicals, plus books, research reports, and proceedings.