Digital libraries (DLs) are new and innovative information systems, under constant development and change, and therefore evaluation is of critical importance to ensure not only their correct evolution but also their acceptance by the user and application communities. The Evaluation activity of the DELOS Network of Excellence has performed a large-scale survey of current DL evaluation activities. This study has resulted in a description of the state of the art in the field, which is presented in this paper. The paper also proposes a new framework for the evaluation of DLs, as well as for recording, describing and analyzing the related research field. The framework includes a methodology for the classification of current evaluation procedures. The objective is to provide a set of flexible and adaptable guidelines for DL evaluation

We present the results of a questionnaire survey for the access and reproduction policies of 67 digital collections in 34 libraries (national, academic, public, special etc) from 13 countries. We examine and analyze the above policies in relation to specific factors, such as, the acquisition method, copyright ownership, library type (national, academic, etc.), content creation (digitized, born-digital) and content type (audio, video, etc.); how these factors affect the policies of the examined digital collections. Responses were received from a range of library sectors but by far the best responses came from academic libraries, in which we focus. We extract policy (access, reproduction) rules and alternatives according to these factors that lead to a policy decision tree on digital information management for academic libraries. The resulting decision tree is based on a policy model; the model and tree are divided into two parts: for digitized and born-digital content.

This study aims to investigate the query formulation and reformulation patterns such as generalisations, specifications, parallel movements and replacements with synonyms within the search procedure. Results showed that users reformulated their queries by using terms contained in the retrieved results while in the query reformulation process they mainly used terms with parallel meanings. Participants used equally either more specific or more general terms for follow-up queries. Finally, the study revealed that a high proportion of same terms were used instead of unique ones; half of them were included in the Eurovoc thesaurus.

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We compare the usage of a Digital Library with many different categories of collections, by examining its log files for a period of twenty months, and we conclude that the access points that the users mostly refer to, depend heavily on the type of content of the collection, the detail of the existing metadata and the target user group. We also found that most users tend to use simple query structures (e.g. only one search term) and very few and primitive operations to accomplish their request. Furthermore, as they get more experienced, they reduce the number of operations in their sessions.