Summary report from the 2004 ACRL Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship recipien

Jeng, Judy

English

San Jose State University

Usability of the digital library: An evaluation model

SJSU ScholarWorks

San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Faculty Publications School of Information 1-1-2006 Usability of the digital library: An evaluation model Judy Jeng San Jose State University, jeng.judy@gmail.com Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/slis_pub  Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Judy Jeng. "Usability of the digital library: An evaluation model" College and Research Libraries News (2006): 78-79. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Information at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@sjsu.edu. Stephanie Orphan N e w s  f r o m  t h e  F i e l d  ALA providing opportunities to volunteer at Annual Conference in New Orleans Librarians and library staff attending the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans this June will have the opportunity to par­ticipate in daylong community service ef­forts to help rebuild the city. As part of ALA’s ongoing efforts to help the libraries and communities in the Gulf Coast, con­ference attendees will be able to volunteer for a full­day community service project on Friday, June 23 or Tuesday, June 27. Con­ference goers will be able to choose from activities to help the New Orleans Public Library, Orleans Parish School District, or other community rebuilding efforts. Those wishing to volunteer should reg­ister at www.ala.org/annual (listed in the “Special Registration Section” of the registra­tion form). The registration fee is $10, which includes transportation to and from the community project, lunch, and a “Libraries Build Communities” t­shirt. PALINET celebrates 70 years PALINET, the member­owned and governed regional library network serving the Mid­Atlantic region, celebrated its 70th birthday on January 11, 2006. The organization was established in 1936 out of a need for local and, later, statewide union cataloging. To­day PALINET represents more than 600 li­braries, information centers, museums, and archives and continues to promote library cooperation and resource sharing. Coincid­ing with this milestone is the culmination of an ongoing branding project to update PALINET’s appearance, including a new, more contemporary logo. Northeastern offers e-learning tool on new media Librarians, students, and communication and journalism professors at Northeastern University have collaborated to create “Pub­lic/Private Intersections in New Media,” an e­learning tool focused on new media. The project, which is online at www.lib.neu. edu/newmedia, is intended to introduce students to key concepts in new media and to address a host of new media issues, such as the collapse of distinctions between me­dia forms and the societal effects of new technologies (for example, blogs, chat rooms, and TiVo). The Web site includes a presentation on key concepts in new me­dia, essays by contributing scholars, and suggestions for further reading. NYU hosts Franklin exhibition In honor of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, New York Uni­versity’s (NYU) College of Arts and Sciences, in conjunction with its Division of Libraries, is hosting an exhibition entitled, “Images of Benjamin Franklin: As Seen by Himself and Others.” The exhibit, which opened Febru­ary 2, will be on display in the Mamdouha S. Bobst Gallery in NYU’s Bobst Library through December 2006. It features more than 150 items from the collection of Stu­art Karu and uses documents, books, en­gravings, artifacts, and fine art pieces to tell the story of Franklin, as citizen, politician, founding father, diplomat, and media mogul. A conference coinciding with the launch of the exhibit was held February 2 and 3. ProQuest analysis of dissertations and theses shows business research on top The top ten dissertations purchased in 2004 from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (PQDT) databases, which contain more than 1.8 million titles, were related to busi­ness. The best­selling dissertation of 2004 was “Customer service leadership skills and customer relationship management,” by Vincent James DeFazio. PQDT’s dissertation database includes bibliographic citations for materials rang­ing from the first U.S. dissertation accepted in 1861 to those accepted as recently as last semester. The full text of more than 1 million titles is also available in paper and microform formats; the Library of Congress has designated the PQDT digital collection as the nation’s offi cial off­site repository for digital dissertations and theses. ProQuest C&RL News February 2006  76 also makes portions of the PQDT database available for purchase through Amazon. com. ACRL announces Student Paper Awards for Baltimore conference ACRL is offering Student Paper Awards for its 13th National Conference, “Sailing into the Future—Charting Our Destiny,” to be held in Baltimore, March 29–April 1, 2007. Two Student Paper Awards of complimentary conference registration and a $500 stipend are available. Student Paper Awards will be awarded for research papers authored by library school students. Papers may report the results of completed research, describe research in progress, or present a position on a compelling problem or issue in one or more of the conference tracks. Papers should be 1,800 to 2,500 words and should be scholarly, well organized, clearly writ­ten, and rigorously argued. Accepted pa­pers will be published on the Web and as part of the print conference proceedings, and will be presented during the Baltimore conference. Full text of the Call for Participation is available online at www.acrl.org/baltimore (click “Proposals”). Proposals must be sub­mitted by May 10, 2006, via the online pro­posal form (www.eshow2000.com/acrl/2007 /program_proposal_submission.cfm). Ques­tions should be directed to msutton@ala.org, (312) 280­2522. Swets to distribute ScholarlyStats Swets Information Services has been ap­pointed as the first Global Channel Part­ner for MPS Technologies’ ScholarlyStats. ScholarlyStats is a new service that enables libraries to outsource the administration of their usage statistics. As a distributor of this service, SwetsWise usage statistics are now included in the ScholarlyStats service, and further integration between the two ser­vices are being explored. MPS developed ScholarlyStats with the help of more than 50 libraries during the beta phase in 2005. The service officially launched in January. Blackwell adds 59 journal titles Blackwell Book Publishing has added 59 new journal titles to its list in 2006 and formed 39 new partnerships. The company now partners with 665 societies and will publish 805 medical, academic, scientifi c, and professional journal titles. Blackwell delivers comprehensive services to societ­ies, including online publication, marketing and public relations, library sales and sup­port, customer service and distribution, and membership management. NCSU unveils Endeca online catalog North Carolina State University (NCSU) is the first library to deploy a new online cata­log, Endeca ProFind. Through its advanced search and guided navigation capabilities, the new platform provides the speed and fl exibility of popular online search engines, while capitalizing on exisitng catalog re­cords. After submitting a search, users are presented with a list of matching results ranked by relevance and are offered sev­eral navigation refinement options based on characteristics of the materials in the results set. Navigation options include top­ic, author, genre, language, material type, format, and availability. Catalog users can also browse the entire collection by sub­ject without entering a search. The new catalog allows users to browse their results along predefined facets with context­spe­cific values automatically generated from the results set itself. The catalog is avail­able for searching at http://www.lib.ncsu. edu/catalog/. UNC Web site focuses on southern Jewish history The University of North Carolina­Chapel Hill (UNC­CH) has created the Web site, “A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life,” which chronicles the story of southern Jewish settlers and their descendants from the late 1600s through the 21st century. The site feature portraits, maps, historical documents, ritual books, and objects from the early period through the present. Visitors can listen to interviews featuring voices from the past and read transcripts. “A Portion of the People” offers material from a recent traveling exhibit un­dertaken by the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina. The site is a result of a collaboration among representa­tives from UNC’s Davis Library, the Caro­lina Center for Jewish Studies, the McKis­February 2006  77 C&RL News Summary report from the 2004 ACRL Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship recipient Ed. note: Each year ACRL awards the Doc­toral Dissertation Fellowship. Recipients are awarded $1,500 cash and a citation donated by Thomson Scientific. Below is a synopsis of the completed disserta­tion of Judy Jeng, the 2004 fellowship winner. Usability of the Digital Library: An Evaluation Model (disser tation, Rutgers University) The main research goal of this disserta­tion is to develop a model and a suite of instruments to evaluate the usability of academic digital libraries.  Empirical research in usability of digital libraries is lean. Blandford and Buchanan1 call for further work on methods for analyzing usability, including an understanding of how to balance rigor, appropriateness of techniques, and practical limitations. Usability in this study was examined from the perspectives of effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability. It is unique in that it combines those four criteria in one model and considers both quantifying elements and affect measure. This study operationalizes those criteria sick Museum, and Dale Rosengarten of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston. SOLINET and HBCU Library Alliance publish report on state of HBCUs The Southeastern Library Network (SOLI­NET) and the HBCU Library Alliance have published an assessment of the state of li­braries at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). “The State of Libraries at Historically Black Colleges and Univer­sities” uses data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics through its biennial Academic Libraries Survey. The statistical study describes levels of support for and services from HBCU libraries and compares these to those for other peer aca­demic libraries in the United States. It of­fers a baseline for future comparison among and provides strategy to measure. Effec­tiveness in this study was measured by accuracy rate. Efficiency was measured by the speed and the number of steps needed to complete tasks. Satisfaction is a multifaceted criterion and was examined in the areas of ease of use, organization of information, labeling and terminology, visual appearance, content, and error correction. Learnability was measured by asking subjects to search a new site and then measure how soon the subjects can begin their first task, the accuracy rate, and the speed. The study applied several techniques, including formal usability testing, ques­tionnaire, interview, think aloud, and log analysis. In order to confirm findings, there were two stages of experiments. The total number of subjects was 41 students. It was a cross­institutional us­ability study. The test sites were Rutgers University Libraries Web site and Queens College Web site. The study found interlocking relation­ships among effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The longer it took for a subject to perform a task, the greater the (continues on following page) HBCUs and of HBCUs with non­HBCUs and provides data that can be used to strengthen li­braries at HBCUs. The report is available on the SOLINET Web site at www.solinet.net/resources /HBCUstats. Endeavor announces major product line changes Endeavor Information Systems announced at the ALA Midwinter Meeting that it is im­plementing several major changes to many of its key product offerings, including new naming for the products affected. The fi rst changes are to the product family referred to as the Endeavor foundation layer of tech­nology, which consists of Voyager, Merid­ian, Curator (the new name for what was formerly ENCompass for Digital Collections) and Journals Onsite (formerly ENCompass for Journals Onsite). These products are C&RL News February 2006  78 (continued from previous page) number of steps involved.The greater the number of steps involved in completing a task, the lower the satisfaction.The more time spent on completing a task, the lower the satisfaction. Further, incorrect answers entailed more steps and more time, while correct answers entailed fewer steps and less time. This means that when the subject knew how to locate the answer, it took fewer steps and required less time. The present study found the effect sizes of the relationships range from medium to strong. Although there are interlocking relationships, effectiveness, effi ciency,and satisfaction are three distinct criteria and should be measured separately. One cannot replace the other. The study results indicate that demo­graphic factors, including gender, age, sta­tus, academic major, ethnic background, years at the institution, and frequency of using the library’s Web site, do not have any statistically significant effect on performance. However, it appears that ethnic background may affect satisfaction ratings. Cross­cultural usability is an inter­esting topic for further research. rich data repositories, and each is designed to manage a different type of library con­tent: physical assets, e­resources, digital ob­jects, and e­journals. The Curator product will debut in mid­2006 and feature major architectural changes in terms of support for XML schemas to handle new metadata standards. Enhanced ScienceDirect improves access to Elsevier content Access to Elsevier’s full­text, peer­reviewed journal and book content on its Web plat­form, ScienceDirect, will be enhanced with new features beginning in February 2006. ScienceDirect is introducing a new type of Article in Press, referred to as Accepted Manuscripts. These are manuscripts which have been peer­reviewed and selected for publication by the journal editor but have The study also examines the issues of user­lostness and click cost. It further uncovers users’ criteria on ease of use, organization of information, terminology, visual attractiveness, and mistake recov­ery.These were reported in the author’s doctoral dissertation and in the author’s recent publication.2 The model and the instruments pro­posed in this research should be appli­cable to other academic digital libraries or information systems, although the specific tasks need to be tailored to each specific system. Notes1.A. Blandford and G. Buchanan, Work­shop report: Usability of digital libraries @ JCDL’02.ACM SIGIR Forum, 36 (2): 83–89. Retrieved May 16, 2005, from ACM Digital Library database. 2. J. Jeng,“Usability assessment of aca­demic digital libraries: Effectiveness, effi ­ciency, satisfaction, and learnability,”Libri: International Journal of Libraries and Information Services, 55 (2/3): 96–121. —Judy Jeng, New Jersey City University, jjeng@njcu.edu yet to be edited by Elsevier’s production staff. Accepted Manuscripts will be available for approximately 200 journals initially, with further titles to be added throughout the year. New manuscripts will be available on average five days after acceptance, which is four to six weeks earlier than is currently the case. The articles will be citable using DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and searchable by title, author name, and full text. ScienceDi­rect will also extend its various export op­tions and enable the transfer of bibliographic data to RefWorks, the Web­based reference management tool from Cambridge Scien­tific Abstracts. Users will be able to export selected data directly to RefWorks, which opens a Web browser interface immediately on clicking the “export” link, allowing users to move seamlessly between the two Web­based systems. February 2006  79 C&RL News 

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Usability of the digital library: An evaluation model

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