This study is to develop and evaluate methods and instruments for assessing the usability of digital libraries. It discusses the dimensions of usability, what methods have been applied in evaluating usability of digital libraries, their applicability, and criteria. It is found in the study that there exists an interlocking relationship among effective ness, effi ciency, and satisfaction. It provides operational cri teria for effectiveness, effi ciency, satisfaction, and learn ability. It discovers users’ criteria on ”ease of use,” ”or gani za tion of in formation,” ”terminology and labeling,” ”visual attractiveness,” and ”mistake recovery.” Common causes of ”user lostness” were found. ”Click cost” was examined.

Usability Assessment of Academic Digital Libraries: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Satisfaction, and Learnability

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.

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What is usability in the context of the digital library and how can it be measured

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of user satisfaction in the context of academic web digital library (DL). A model based on the re-specified information system success model was developed and tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed survey research methodology with self-administered questionnaire as the research instrument. The questionnaire was developed based on the instruments used by previous researchers. The population of the study was students enrolled for the bachelor’s degree in the Faculty of Information Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. These students were chosen because of researcher’s easy access to the sampling frame. Descriptive analysis and inferential analysis which include SEM were executed using IBM SPSS and AMOS statistical software. Findings – The findings indicate that information quality, systems quality, service quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use ...

Assessing users satisfaction with web digital library: the case of Universiti Teknologi MARA

Purpose – The present study aims to review the literature concerning Digital Libraries (DLs) and user interfaces in order to identify, determine, and suggest evaluation criteria for a DLs user interface. Accordingly, this study's objectives are threefold: explore which criteria exert a significant relationship with the DLs user interface; identify a set of criteria that appears to be useful for evaluating DLs user interface; and determine evaluation criteria that have more frequency and occurrence in the related texts reviewed.Design/methodology/approach – To do it, first, identifying related texts was necessary. Consequently, keywords such as “DLs user interface evaluation”,” DLs user interfaces”, “DLs evaluation”, “DLs usability”, “user interface evaluation”, “DLs research”, “web sites user interface evaluation”, “user interface standards”, and the like have been searched in the web as well as in some leading databases including Emerald, Proquest, SagePub, ScienceDirect, LISA, ERIC, ACM, and Springer. A...

Determining evaluation criteria for digital libraries' user interface: a review

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature of digital libraries (DLs), explore some issues and indicate some considerations. The paper also demonstrates the current situation and orientation of research topics and priorities in DLs.Design/methodology/approach – Keywords such as “DL research”, “DL evaluation”, “DL management”, “DLs”, “DL studies” and so on were searched for on the web as well as in some leading databases, including Emerald, Proquest, SagePub, ScienceDirect and Springer. The search focused on three main categories in relation to DL literature: evaluation or performance appraisal, management, and education.Findings – The review demonstrates that a lot has been learned in a short time via DL studies. However, a number of issues are yet to be resolved. In other words, research in the arena of DLs is still growing and it is predicted that new horizons will emerge, along with a variety of issues.Research limitations/implications – The review does not claim to be comprehensiv...

Digital libraries in the mirror of the literature: issues and considerations

This paper describes an adaptive and collaborative environment for helping problem solving. The main user of the environment is a teacher, here called teacher-student, who accesses the environment aiming at solving difficulties he/ she encounters in the classroom. In order to improve the usability of the system during the problem-solving process, the environment provides the teacherstudent with adaptive assistance by identifying what information should be 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Hershey PA 17033, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com INFORMATION SCIENCE PUBLISHING This chapter appears in the book, Usability Evaluation of Online Learning Programs, edited by Claude Ghaoui. Copyright © 2003, Idea Grou Publishing. Copying or distributing i print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 70 Furtado, Vasco Furtado, Lincoln Mattos & Vanderdonckt Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. provided and how it should be shown on the screen according to characteristics of the teacher-student, domain and context of use. Moreover, the teacherstudent has a collaborative support that allows him/her to interact with other teacher-students. INTRODUCTION The usability of an interactive system refers to how easy it is to use and learn the system. In online learning system contexts, the pedagogic usability is also related to how easy and effective it is for a student to learn something using the system. An attempt to ensure usability is to take into account characteristics of the user (such as preferences, language, culture and system experience) and of the context of use (such as easy accessibility and good luminosity of the environment) during the development of a system. This allows the adaptation of the interfaces to the user’s needs, varying, for instance, the kind of assistance that is to be offered to the user and the way it is to be shown in order to cope with individual differences. Adaptability improves handling and learning of the interface (Benyon, Crerar, & Wilkinson, 2001). Another way to ensure pedagogic usability is to make it possible for the user to reflect about his/her difficulties on his/her own and with others. Several educational theories claim that learning depends on the individual’s knowledge being built by social interactions (Bourne, McMaster, Rieger, & Campbel, 1997; Vygotsky, 1984). We have identified some problems to a successful deployment of online learning: • Lack of learning quality—Many online learning systems don’t bring users to reflect about their problems since they simply present predefined solutions. • Lack of adaptive tools and guidelines—Learning tools are very useful, but most are not adaptive (Schon, 1987) or else the user model is predefined (Gomes & Viccari, 1999). In addition, user interfaces (UIs) of such tools are generally specified without taking into account guidelines (Eleuterio & Eberspacher, 1999). • Lack of training in new technologies—Any teacher (our teacher-student), as part of his/her professional development, needs continuous training. Teachers’ training is often carried out by using old technologies that cannot deal with adaptive and collaborative processes. It is necessary to fulfill these needs by adopting an integrated pedagogical-technological content (Perrenoud, 2001). All of these issues have a critical impact on the usability of online learning. Thus, we developed a collaborative and adaptive distance learning environment called TeleCADI that helps a teacher-student solve his/her difficulties during classes by offering adaptive assistance. Tele-CADI aims: • To increase the quality of learning—Tele-CADI is supposed to do this by adopting a collaborative problem-based solving strategy. The basis of this strategy is the use of case-based reasoning methods (Aamodt & Plaza, 1994). 17 more pages are available in the full version of this document, which may be purchased using the "Add to Cart" button on the product's webpage: www.igi-global.com/chapter/improving-usability-onlinelearning-system/30604?camid=4v1 This title is available in InfoSci-Books, InfoSci-Educational Technologies, Library Science, Information Studies, and Education, InfoSci-Educational Science and Technology. Recommend this product to your librarian: www.igi-global.com/e-resources/libraryrecommendation/?id=1

Fernando Lincoln

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Improving Usability of an Online Learning system by Means of Multimedia, Collaboration and Adaptation Resources