Usability of digital libraries

摘要

The issue of usability has concerned the digital libraries (DLs) community, at least peripherally, over many years. There is, after all, little point in delivering sophisticated libraries with novel features if those systems are then ignored by the intended users because they are too difficult to use or do not offer the key features that users require. However, the challenge of how to deliver DLs that are truly useful and usable remains elusive, often given second place to solving novel technical challenges. This was the thinking behind our organisation of a workshop on the topic of usability which was held at JCDL'02. This collection of papers derives indirectly from that workshop. At the workshop, ten papers on different aspects of usability were presented, interspersed with extensive discussion on key issues arising from those papers. Papers covered both practical issues, including empirical and analytical evaluations of existing systems, and theoretical issues, for example, developing taxonomies of aspects of digital library use. Following this successful workshop, we put together the call for papers for this special issue of JDL, soliciting papers from both attendees at the workshop and others in the community. At this point, we brought in Matt Jones as a third editor, so that papers on which any of the editors were co-authors could be dealt with by two editors with no involvement of the authoring editor.