Towards Expressive and User Friendly Interfaces for Digital Libraries Containing Heterogeneous Data

Digital libraries in Germany are currently making a shift from more self-contained projects or institutional driven activities to concerted actions coor-dinated by government and funding agencies. The “library” aspect of collecting things and cataloguing them in a standardized format and with a standardized indexing language is no longer the primary concern here. The goal is to combine heterogeneous information from different, often distributed sources and to make them available in an integrated way. As the user interface is the intermediate between the user’s information needs and the digital library’s complex inner structure, new ways of designing the user interface are needed to adapt to the growing complexity while ensuring a consistent look and feel.