Creators, Composers and Consumers: Experiences of Designing a Digital Library

Blandford, Ann; Gow, Jeremy; Buchanan, George; Warwick, Claire; Rimmer, Jon

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-74796-3_23

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similarly, there are few other types of interactive systems where it might be important to consider providing the functionality to restrict access at a variety of levels (e.g., access to the resource itself, access to particular sources within the resource, access to particular documents). One should note, however, that addressing access issues may be not necessarily be within developers' control (see Bates, 2002; Blandford, Gow, Buchanan, Rimmer, & Warwick, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using information behaviors to evaluate the functionality and usability of electronic resources: From Ellis's model to evaluation

Makri

Blandford

Cox

2008

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Information behavior (IB) research involves examining how people look for and use information, often with the sole purpose of gaining insights into the behavior displayed. However, it is also possible to examine IB with the purpose of using the insights gained to design new tools or improve the design of existing tools to support information seeking and use. This approach is advocated by David Ellis who, over two decades ago, presented a model of information seeking behaviors and made suggestions for how electronic tools might be designed to support these behaviors. Ellis also recognized that IBs might be used as the basis for evaluating as well as designing electronic resources. In this article, we present the IB evaluation methods. These two novel methods, based on an extension of Ellis's model, use the empirically observed IBs of lawyers as a framework for structuring user-centered evaluations of the functionality and usability of electronic resources. In this article, we present the IB methods and illustrate their use through the discussion of two examples. We also discuss benefits and limitations, grounded in specific features of the methods. IntroductionIn this article, we present the information behavior (IB) methods-two novel, specialized methods for evaluating electronic resources ranging from Internet search engines to digital libraries and indexes/citators. The IB methods are novel as they are based on the observed IB of lawyers and are theoretically underpinned by an extension of Ellis's behavioral model of information seeking. The methods are specialized in the sense that they are intended to be used to evaluate electronic resources as opposed to other types of interactive system. The IB methods were developed based on the premise that observed IB can provide a useful structure for evaluating electronic resources by using the observed behaviors as theoretical "lenses" to evaluate the functionality Received April 8, 2008; revised June 20, 2008; accepted June 20, 2008 © 2008 ASIS&T • Published online 7 August 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.20927 of electronic resources (i.e., the features provided by the resource aimed at supporting users) and the usability of these resources (i.e., how easy to use the resource is).Although both the IB functionality and usability methods are underpinned by the same IB theory, they can be regarded as two separate evaluation methods in their own right. An IB functionality evaluation aims to provide data on the range of functionality supported by a particular electronic resource (and provides the basis for discussing whether this range is appropriate). An IB usability evaluation aims to provide data relating to the difficulties that users face when using a particular resource and how severe and easy to address the evaluator considers these issues to be.We continue this article by discussing the rationale behind the IB methods and the theoretical basis of the methods. This includes reference to the empirically observed IBs o...

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%