User interfaces for information strolling in a digital library

This paper describes the issues involved in developing a digital library user interface and how to realize information strolling. It further reports our three user interface systems: virtual open stacks and a CG librarian to simulate a conventional library, associated data retrieval to understand multimodal dialogue, and a WWW-based interface to realize the high quality relevance feedback and graphical visualization of the retrieved data. With a digital library, users will be able to access any part of the primary sources. In the user interface and retrieval, it will be necessary to handle various relationships between multimedia data and to easily and freely identify and utilize those relationships. Information strolling is designed to allow users to ''walk'' around in the information space with full knowledge of and control over the relationships between the data.