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How usable are operational digital libraries: a usability evaluation of system interactions

Published: 15 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports a usability evaluation of three operational digital libraries (DLs): the ACM DL, the IEEE Computer Society DL, and the IEEE Xplore DL. An experiment was conducted in a usability lab and 35 participants completed the assigned tasks. The results demonstrate that all three DLs have more or less usability problems by various measures. Searching in Xplore by inexperienced users was problematic, and browsing in IEEE CS was extremely difficult for all users. Interaction design features that caused these usability problems were identified and discussed. The study implies there is still large room for operational DLs to improve in order to provide more satisfactory services.

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  1. How usable are operational digital libraries: a usability evaluation of system interactions

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    EICS '09: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems
    July 2009
    348 pages
    ISBN:9781605586007
    DOI:10.1145/1570433
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 15 July 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. digital libraries
    2. interaction design
    3. usability testing

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    EICS'09: Engineering Interactive Computing Systems
    July 15 - 17, 2009
    PA, Pittsburgh, USA

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    View all
    • (2023)Usability assessment of scholarly publishers’ online journal interfacesJournal of Data, Information and Management10.1007/s42488-023-00110-z5:4(363-374)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2023
    • (2021)Comprehensive Review and Future Research Directions on Dynamic Faceted SearchApplied Sciences10.3390/app1117811311:17(8113)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2021
    • (2017)Trends and challenges of visual search interfaces in digital libraries and repositoriesThe Electronic Library10.1108/EL-03-2015-004635:1(69-98)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2017
    • (2015)Heuristic Evaluation of University Institutional Repositories Based on DSpaceDesign, User Experience, and Usability: Interactive Experience Design10.1007/978-3-319-20889-3_12(119-130)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2015
    • (2014)Evaluating a tool for the exploratory analysis of usability information using a cognitive walkthrough methodProceedings of the 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium10.1145/2637002.2637033(243-246)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2014
    • (2010)Testing visualization on the use of information systemsProceedings of the third symposium on Information interaction in context10.1145/1840784.1840840(365-370)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2010

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