Constituencies of Use: Representative Usage Scenarios in International Digital Library User Studies, a Case Study on Europeana
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Date
2010Author
Birrell, Duncan
Dobreva, Milena
Ünal, Yurdagül
Feliciati, Pierluigi
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Digital libraries are still being developed independently of the extensive
involvement of end users, those who form their constituencies of use. The
traditional approach to digital library development is to consult with experts
or communities of practice in a particular field and attempt to incorporate
recommendations into the interface functionality and service models, whilst
user needs are often not comprehensively scoped in advance, at the
development stage, or regularly consulted for the purposes of formative and
summative evaluation. Recent developments in digital library design
concentrate effort on the use of innovative search and browse tools,
streamlined techniques for navigation and display, and the provision of
personalised areas for search management and information sharing; such
developments, however, remain unaligned to any thorough understanding of
exactly how user behaviour alters depending on scenario of use, and the
problems encountered by end users in task completion within different
contexts. This paper reports on the deployment of usage scenarios to evaluate
the Europeana digital library v1.0 prototype.