How Should One Explore the Digital Library of the Future?

This article partially addresses a challenge from Licklider in his 1965 book on “Libraries of the Future,” focusing on how to build extensible digital libraries that can dramatically expand the support of exploration. A new methodology connects the efforts of User eXperience researchers with those of subject matter experts (domain scientists, curators, researchers, and so on) and developers. This allows constructing a knowledge graph representing the relationships among goals, tasks, workflows, and services. A reasoner empowers authorized users to have their goals met with suitable workflows that are dynamically generated and executed. Student teams have applied the new methodology to support users interested in tweets, web pages, or electronic theses and dissertations, as well as those curating and experimenting with those collections. Exploration is thus broadened across content types and their elements, with an extensible set of services, to address an arbitrary set of stakeholder goals.