Digital Library Evaluation: Toward an Evolution of Concepts

published or submitted for publicatio

How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects

Charting Success: Using Practical Measures to Assess Information Literacy Skills in the First-Year Writing Course

Objective – The aim was to measure the impact of a peer-to-peer model on information literacy skill-building among first-year students at a small commuter college in the United States. The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is the state’s flagship public university and UNH Manchester is one of its seven colleges. This study contributed to a program evaluation of the Research Mentor Program at UNH Manchester whereby peer writing tutors are trained in basic library research skills to support first-year students throughout the research and writing process. Methods – The methodology employed a locally developed pre-test/post-test instrument with fixed-choice and open-ended questions to measure students’ knowledge of the library research process. Anonymized data was collected using an online survey with SurveyMonkey™ software. A rubric was developed to score the responses to open-ended questions. Results – The study indicated a positive progression toward increased learning for the three information literacy skills targeted: 1) using library resources correctly, 2) building effective search strategies, and 3) evaluating sources appropriately. Students scored higher in the fixed-choice questions than the open-ended ones, demonstrating their ability to more effectively identify the applicable information literacy skill than use the language of information literacy to describe their own research behavior. Conclusions – The assessment methodology used was an assortment of low-key, locally-developed instruments that provided timely data to measure students understanding of concepts taught and to apply those concepts correctly. Although the conclusions are not generalizable to other institutions, the findings were a valuable component of an ongoing program evaluation. Further assessment measuring student performance would strengthen the conclusions attained in this study

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours

What is usability in the context of the digital library and how can it be measured?

This paper reviews how usability has been defined in the context of the digital library, what methods have been applied and their applicability, and proposes an evaluation model and a suite of instruments for evaluating usability for academic digital libraries. The model examines effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability. It is found that there exists an interlocking relationship among effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. It also examines how learnability interacts with these three attributes

Integrating Information Literacy into the Virtual University: A Course Model

published or submitted for publicatio

E-Journals and the Big Deal: A Review of the Literature

Faced with shrinking budgets and increased subscription prices, many academic libraries are seeking ways to reduce the cost of e-journal access. A common target for cuts is the “Big Deal,” or large bundled subscription model, a term coined by Kenneth Frazier in a 2001 paper criticizing the effects of the Big Deal on the academic community. The purpose of this literature review is to examine issues related to reducing e-journal costs, including criteria for subscription retention or cancellation, decision-making strategies, impacts of cancellations, and other options for e-journal content provision. Commonly used criteria for decision-making include usage statistics, overlap analysis, and input from subject specialists. The most commonly used strategy for guiding the process and aggregating data is the rubric or decision grid. While the e-journal landscape supports several access models, such as Pay-Per-View, cloud access, and interlibrary loan, the Big Deal continues to dominate. Trends over the past several years point to dwindling support for the Big Deal however, due largely to significant annual rate increases and loss of content control

Preparing Information Literate Teachers: A Review of the Literature

Ye