Progress in the Design and Evaluation of DigitalLibraries: Implications for Research and Education

Sponsored by SIG-DL

Kyung-Sun Kim, ModeratorSchool of Library & Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 4217

H.C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706. kskim@slis.wisc.edu

Robert AllenCollege of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University, 3141 ChestnutSt, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Bob.Allen@cis.drexel.edu

Laura BartoloCollege of Arts and Sciences, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio,44242. lbartolo@kent.edu

Anita ColemanSchool of Information Resources and Library Science, University of

Arizona-Tucson. 1515 E. First St., Tucson, AZ 85719 . asc@u.arizona.edu

Ingrid Hsieh-YeeSchool of Library and Information Science, Catholic University of America, Cardinal

Station, Washington, DC 20064. hsiehyee@cua.edu

Digital libraries are designed and developed to provide users with better information accessand services. Good design and evaluation plans are critically important for developing a usefuldigital library (DL). This panel will address the current state and future direction of DL designand evaluation. The program aims to advance our understanding of the various approaches fordesigning and evaluating digital libraries, and also to highlight the implications of these effortsfor DL research and education.

Design and evaluation of DLIST

Anita Coleman

The Digital Library of Information Science and Technology (DLIST) is an open access,cross-institutional repository of full-text electronic resources in the domains of Library andInformation Science (LIS) and Information Technology (IT). Anita Coleman will share herexperience with the creation, design, and management of DLIST (http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu), an open access archive (OAA). She will highlight and discuss different options for the design ofDLs. The challenges of quality and interoperability in an open, scholarly community DL will beaddressed.

Enhancing a digital library of historical newspapers

Robert Allen

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP: http://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html) iscreating a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states andU.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will bepermanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via theInternet. An accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdingsinformation on the Website will direct users to newspaper titles available in all types of formats.Robert Allen will describe a set of services built to extend and evaluate the basic functionalityprovided by NDNP. These services include "event gazetteer" and timeline visualizations.

Evaluation in the NSDL: EIESC and MatDL

Laura M. Bartolo

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) was created by the National Science Foundation(NSF) to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovationsin teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematicseducation. Starting with a partnership of NSDL-funded projects, NSDL is emerging as a centerof innovation in digital libraries as applied to education, and a community center for groupsfocused on digital-library-enabled science education. Laura M. Bartolo will give an overview ofthe NSF National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Educational Impact and Evaluation StandingCommittee’s (EIESC) efforts in the area of evaluation as well as a detailed description of theevaluation design and results of one NSDL project, the Materials Digital Library (MatDL:

http://matdl.org).

Evaluation of digital libraries: progress and next stepsIngrid Hsieh-Yee

Ingrid Hsieh-Yee will present her analysis of how digital libraries have been evaluated anddiscuss the implications of these studies for the future DL research and education.