Digital libraries: what do users want?
| Pages | 395-412 |
| Date | 01 July 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520610686292 |
| Published date | 01 July 2006 |
| Author | Elahe Kani‐Zabihi,Gheorghita Ghinea,Sherry Y. Chen |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Digital libraries:
what do users want?
Elahe Kani-Zabihi, Gheorghita Ghinea and Sherry Y. Chen
School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics,
Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to determine user suggestions for digital libraries’
functionality and features.
Design/methodology/approach – A survey was conducted as part of this study, in which users’
suggestions for digital libraries were solicited, as well as their ranking opinions on a range of
suggested digital library features.
Findings – The study revealed that, regardless of users’ information technology (IT) backgrounds,
their expectations of digital libraries’ functionality are the same. However, based on users’ previous
experiences with digital libraries, their requirements with respect to specific features may change.
Practical implications – Involving users in digital library design should be an integral step in the
process of building a digital library – in addition to the classic roles of evaluation and testing.
Originality/value – In previous digital library user studies, users were involved implicitly (e.g.
observed) or explicitly (e.g. diary notes). However, they were never asked to suggest digital library
features or functionalities, as this was left to usability and domain experts. This study approached
digital library design from a new perspective, giving users an opportunity to express their suggestions
on future functionality and features of digital libraries. Moreover, in contrast to previous work, this
study has explicitly taken into account the IT abilities of those interacting with a digital library.
Keywords Digital libraries,User interfaces, User studies
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
When implementing a digital library (DL), users are often not involved in the design
cycle, yet experts from library science, computer science and human-com puter
interaction (HCI) all participate in specifying the system design (Witten et al., 2001).
Indeed, DLs are built as a response to the needs of a particular community, and rarely
involve people with any previous domain experience (Suleman and Fox, 2001). DLs are
then evaluated by undertaking experiments that usually employ a small group of
users.
DLs have addressed many design issues, notably the tension between DL designers
and authors and librarians (information suppliers) of DLs (Theng et al., 2000).
Furthermore, DLs currently provide inadequate support for activities, such as use of
the system, owing to a lack of familiarity and learning as well as the lack of space for
users to work and collaborate. Information in DLs can be viewed as having a form of
“quality stamp”, which restricts DL users as to the content they can access, thus
creating the need to have “sophisticated information skills” (Blandford, 2004). With
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The authors are grateful to all 48 participants who took part in this study and to Stephen Gulliver
for his comments on the paper.
Digital libraries:
what do users
want?
395
Refereed article received
1 January 2006
Revision approved for
publication 6 March 2006
Online Information Review
Vol. 30 No. 4, 2006
pp. 395-412
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520610686292
this in mind, DLs should be designed according to these needs. Focus group interviews
should be employed to tackle these problems and provide an understanding of how
users work with and use information, and how these observations can be fed into the
design of a DL to enhance, rather than obstruct, the experience of using information
(Theng et al., 2000).
Having a better understanding of user behaviours, needs, and user-oriented design
(Blandford and Buchanan, 2003) would enable designers to appreciate what end users
feel about using DLs and what changes would be needed to meet their needs. It is for
this reason that the future of DLs, just like any other information system, is very much
dependent on its users. DL use will be dictated by people, so it makes sense to know
more about them and their needs. To this end, the study presented in this paper
investigates what expectations users have from DLs. Accordingly, the structure of this
paper is as follows: section 2 presents related work in the area of DLs, with sectio n 3
detailing the experiments undertaken as part of our study; results are presented in
section 4, with conclusions and possibility for future work being identified in section 5.
Background
DLs are given different names by the various stakeholders working with them. Thus,
librarians refer to them as “databases” and people in arts and humanities name them
“electronic archives” (Adams and Blandford, 2002). In the UK and Western Europe,
DLs are referred to as “digital surrogates”, being regarded as substitutes for traditional
libraries in their role of “collections of validated and structured information”
(Blandford, 2006).
One definition for a DL states that: a DL is a collection of services and “information
objects” that are available digitally. “Information objects” can be defined as anything
in a digital format such as books, journal articles and sounds, since DLs organise and
present information objects to users, and support them in dealing with these objects
(Leiner, 2005).
Lang (1998) describes that the goal of a DL is to improve access for all users:
The digital library is the widely accepted term describing the use of digital technologies to
acquire, store, preserve and provide access to information and material originally published
in digital form or digitised from existing print, audio-visual and other forms.
The above definitions all convey the same meaning, which reveals that a DL is a source
of information, in different formats, e.g. text, video or audio, and that such information
is stored digitally. Moreover, given the proliferation of communication technologies
such as the internet, it comes as no surprise that, in a modern context, DLs also
represent a networked resource. Thus, for the purposes of the research described in this
paper, the definition that shall be adopted is that “a DL is a networked repository of
digital content”.
The definition of DLs implicitly conveys the advantages of DLs. This is to say, DLs
have changed the way humans interact with information, for, as long as there is an
internet connection available and the user has an appropriate access device, the
requested information can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. Moreover, in so
doing, DLs have introduced learning, and especially distance learning, to new
dimensions (Blandford, 2006). Another advantage of DLs is that, as opposed to
traditional libraries, which have a limited storage space, they have the advantages of
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