Use Scenarios in the Development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT)

A user-centered, iterative design philosophy requires a common language between users, designers and builders to translate user needs into buildable specifications. This paper details the rationale, evolution and implementation of use scenarios —structured narrative descriptions of envisioned system use—in the development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype. This paper discusses the strengths of the scenario approach, obstacles to their use, and lessons learned in the overall development process

Collaborative design of educational digital libraries for African higher education

This thesis will develop a model that can be used to guide collaborative design of educational digital libraries that are relevant to the learning objectives and are appropriate to African Higher Education. Factors affecting connections between educational digital library capabilities, learning processes and learners’ needs in higher education will be identified and used to develop the model. These factors will be identified through qualitative studies with the key players (i.e. academics, information professionals, digital library technical designers and students). The model will be iteratively developed and later evaluated for correctness by some of the key players. So far a preliminary literature review has been done to locate related work and identify knowledge gaps. In addition, a pilot study has been carried out and identified some temporal factors that will be pursued further in the proposed study

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

An Interactive Learning Environment for a Dynamic Educational Digital Library

GeogDL is a digital library of geography examination resources designed to assist students in preparing for a national geography examination in Singapore. We describe an interactive learning environment built into GeogDL that consists of four major components. The practice and review module allows students to attempt individual examination questions, the mock exam provides a simulation of the actual geography examination, the trends analysis tool provides an overview of the types of questions asked in previous examinations, while the contributions module allows students and teachers to create and share knowledge within the digital library.Published versio

Domain-specific markup languages and descriptive metadata: their functions in scientific resource discovery

While metadata has been a strong focus within information professionals’ publications, projects, and initiatives during the last two decades, a significant number of domain-specific markup languages have also been developing on a parallel path at the same rate as metadata standards; yet, they do not receive comparable attention. This essay discusses the functions of these two kinds of approaches in scientific resource discovery and points out their potential complementary roles through appropriate interoperability approaches

Design lessons on access features in PAPER

Using Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation, this paper reports a user study with six usability-trained subjects to evaluate PAPER’s access features in assisting users to retrieve information efficiently, part of an on-going design partnership with stakeholders and designers/developers. PAPER (Personalised Adaptive Pathways for Exam Resources) is an improved version evolving from an earlier implementation of GeogDL built upon G-Portal, a geospatial digital library infrastructure. After two initial evaluations with student and teacher design partners, PAPER has evolved containing a new bundle of personalized, interactive services with four modules : mock exam; personal coach (practice and review); trend analysis and performance review. This paper highlights lessons learnt in the design of PAPER using Nielsen’s heuristics, and discusses implications for the design of access features in digital libraries in general.Accepted versio

WiseNews database for upper primary students and teachers

Parallel Session 8 - 8.02 PaperElectronic databases are widely used by students and teachers at secondary and tertiary level to gather information for academic purposes. Few studies have investigated their use in primary education, especially in the Asian context. A pilot study conducted a year ago has shown that WiseNews, an electronic news database, was effective in facilitating the inquiry project-based learning of primary students at a school in Hong Kong. The current research extends the pilot study by examining the use of WiseNews by upper primary students and their teachers in five local primary schools. Automatic records of students’ and teachers’ database activities provided by WiseNews will be used to examine the usage habit of students and teachers. Students and teachers will be surveyed regarding their perceived usefulness of WiseNews database for learning and teaching purposes. Data collection and analysis adopted a mixed method design. The qualitative analysis will include an in-depth analysis of the types of articles retrieved by the students, in addition to the responses to the open-ended questions on the survey. This research will help teachers and school administrators to assess the effectiveness of WiseNews database in facilitating learning at upper primary levels.postprintThe International Conference on Primary Education, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, China, 25-27 November 2009

G-portal : A map-based digital library for distributed geospatial and georeferenced resources

SingAREN Projec