Exploring Salient Thumbnail Generation for Archival Collections Online

This study evaluated the effectiveness of thumbnails generated using open source image saliency software for representing digitized archival documents. Salient thumbnails were evaluated against a baseline (full images scaled down) in a lab study that assessed the thumbnails' usefulness during finding and re-finding tasks. Results found no significant differences in time or user preference. However, we observed two interesting trends in our data: (1) there were fewer errors for re-finding tasks done with salient thumbnails, suggesting that they may offer some advantages for accuracy of re-finding, and (2) participants spent about 20 seconds longer on average when completing tasks with salient thumbnails. Salient thumbnails may offer a modest advantage over the baseline for re-finding tasks, but their overall suitability for representing a digital archive online depends on the user and task at hand.