Organizing Found Information in Public Digital Library Search

When undertaking complex search scenarios within public digital libraries, users often face challenges in organizing found information. This is an important aspect in supporting exploratory search and cross-session search. In this paper, we present a novel public digital library search interface that includes nested workspaces and a generative AI approach to summarizing what has been saved in these workspaces. This semi-automatic approach to organizing found information was designed to support (1) metacognitive aspects of planning, monitoring, and evaluation during exploratory search and (2) task resumption during cross-session searching. Enhancing workspaces beyond simple collections of saved information holds promise for enabling searchers to more effectively make sense of what they have found while undertaking cross-session exploratory searches.