DEFINING DIGITAL LIBRARY USERS AND NEEDS

Via ShelfLife, No. 121 (August 28 2003)

DEFINING DIGITAL LIBRARY USERS AND NEEDS

"A collaborative Digital Library is a user-centered system. In addition to the traditional purpose of providing resource discovery services, the system might also provide specialized services for some classes of users, ranging from basic alerting and selective dissemination services to complex, virtual community working spaces. In this sense the Digital Library represents a special workspace for a particular community, not only for search and access but also for the process, workflow management, information exchange, and distributed work group communications. But most digital library models are based on non-digital environments. As a result, the perceptions of users and the roles they play are biased by traditional views, which might not be automatically transferable to the digital world. Nor are they appropriate for some new emerging environments. New models are challenging traditional approaches. In many cases they redefine the roles of actors, and even introduce new roles that previously did not exist or were not performed by the same type of actor. With no means of formal expression, it is difficult to understand objectively the key actor/role issues that arise in isolated Digital Library cases, or to perform comparative analysis between different cases. This directly affects how the Technical Problem Areas identified by the June 2001 DELOS/NSF Network of Excellence brainstorming report will be addressed. The report states that the highest-level component of a Digital Library system is related to the system's usage. By understanding the various actors, roles, and relationships, digital libraries will improve their ability to enable optimal user experiences, provide support to actors in their use of Digital Library services, and ultimately ensure that the information is delivered or accessed using the most effective means possible. (Report, DELOS/NSF Working Group, 13 June 2003)"