Anglo-Nordic Seminar on Networking 1996
Session 3: Open OPACs and User Interfaces
Digital Library Users: The User Interface and beyond
Clare Davies
De Montfort University, UK
When we consider users' needs in the electronic (or digital) library,
our disciplinary background and perspective invariably determines our
point of interest. To librarians, who consider the electronic
resources as replacements for paper ones, the terminology and
procedures associated with 'access', 'reserves', 'acquisitions' etc.
determine their ideas of likely user issues. To computer scientists,
for whom an electronic library may seem to be 'just another
information system', it may seem to be enough to apply
well-established principles of human-computer interaction in order to
ensure a usable user interface.
This demonstrates the importance of taking a multidisciplinary
perspective to the digital library. For instance, one of the
author's current interests is in the issues surrounding browsing and
reading text from paper and from digital sources. Even in this
specific aspect of digital library use, different disciplines can
give us various insights into what users do:
- Information science - what users tend to do (and fail on) when
searching and browsing (often meta-information)
- Cognitive psychology - research into reading and discourse
processes, models of information 'schemata'
- Human-computer interaction (HCI) - clutter, text sizes, scrolling,
navigation tools, information hierarchies
- Electronic library studies - people don't want to read on screen
anyway? But then: (1) Why? and (2) How do they decide what's
useful?
Other interesting research questions concerning users include (NB
this is an idiosyncratic and non-comprehensive list!):
- Social, cultural, organisational factors influencing successful
uptake of networked information by different
disciplines/organisations (e.g. physicists - why was it
physicists succeed first in creating and almost universally using
preprint archives? What can we learn from studying disciplinary
and organisational differences?)
- Methodological issues in studying knowledge work (as opposed to
productive, goal-oriented tasks)
- Relationship between navigation and comprehension of information:
what do users notice? what do they select? what do they remember?
How is it different for digital information?
- Non-textual information: how do the questions in (3) apply to
images? to digital maps? to sound? to video?
- Do spatial visualisations help, or are they just fun things for
computer scientists to play with?
- What meta-information can be provided to enable teaching staff to
guide students through information resources?
- What individual differences between users are important?
Cognitive abilities? Expertise (which?)? Special needs?
It is tempting to ask who cares? Surely we can build quite adequate
systems without understanding the whole of user behaviour, can't we?
The answer is yes we probably can, although not without some attempt
at user requirements capture and evaluation. In fact, in the present
funding climate (at least in Britain) we MUST go ahead and build
systems before we fully understand what we're doing. But user
research is still important for at least two reasons:
- We can improve the next generation of systems on the basis of
what we learn about users using the present one.
- The growth of digital information sources gives us an exciting
opportunity to study and understand human activity in new
contexts, which can in turn give us information to feed back into
our pre-existing knowledge of human behaviour and society.
We won't be able to capitalise on these opportunities without a more
coordinated and explicit programme of user research than we have at
present: while projects do their own bits of fragmented work
evaluating specific systems in specific situations, it will continue
to be very difficult to generalise our understanding.
ANGLO-NORDIC SEMINAR ON NETWORKING
Webpage by Isobel Stark of UKOLN
Last updated 12th January 1997