The People in Digital Libraries: Multifaceted Approaches to Assessing Needs and Impact

Digital libraries (DL) serve communities of people and are created and maintained by and for people. People and their information needs are central to all libraries, digital or otherwise. All efforts to design, implement, and evaluate digital libraries must be rooted in the information needs, characteristics, and contexts of the people who will or may use those libraries. Like most principles, the devil is in the details— implementing and applying the principle to practical problems. Human-centered digital library design is particularly challenging because human information behavior is complex and highly context dependent, and the digital library concept and technologies are rapidly evolving. Two important aspects of human-centered design are assessing human information needs and the tasks that arise from those needs and evaluating how the digital library affects subsequent human information behaviors. Given the evolving nature of digital library development, solutions to these challenges must be process-oriented and iterative rather than product-oriented and summative. Given the complexity of human information needs and the uncertainty about the effects of new systems, a multiplicity of data views is essential to guide design and understand the impact of digital libraries. This chapter focuses on two elements of design--assessing information needs and ongoing evaluation of impact. Multifaceted approaches to needs assessment and evaluation of digital libraries are illustrated with three case studies, with particular emphasis on a users needs assessment conducted as part of a project to develop prototype interface designs for the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. The human-centered design principle above links three clusters of constructs: people and their needs, characteristics, and contexts; design, implementation, and evaluation; and digital libraries.