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:

Other interesting research questions concerning users include (NB this is an idiosyncratic and non-comprehensive list!):

  1. 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?)
  2. Methodological issues in studying knowledge work (as opposed to productive, goal-oriented tasks)
  3. 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?
  4. Non-textual information: how do the questions in (3) apply to images? to digital maps? to sound? to video?
  5. Do spatial visualisations help, or are they just fun things for computer scientists to play with?
  6. What meta-information can be provided to enable teaching staff to guide students through information resources?
  7. 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:

  1. We can improve the next generation of systems on the basis of what we learn about users using the present one.
  2. 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

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Last updated 12th January 1997