Evaluating User Requirements for a Digital Library Testbed
Barbara Pfeil Buttenfield · 1994
The development of widespread capabilities for electronic archival and dissemination of data can be coupled with advances in information systems technology to deliver large volumes of information very fast. Paradoxically, as greater volumes of information become available on electronic information networks, they become increasingly difficult to access. Nowhere is this situation more pressing than in the case of spatial information, which has been traditionally treated as a 'separate ' problem by archivists, due to complexities of spatial ordering and indexing. A research project recently funded by NSF will address these problems and implement a working digital library testbed over the next four years. This paper will focus upon one aspect of the testbed, namely evaluating user requirements to inform interface design. The paper presents the evaluation plan, using hypermedia tools to collect real-time interactive logs of user activities on the testbed under design. Conventionally, interactive logging is analyzed by deterministic measures of performance such as counting keystrokes. In this project, the interactive log data will be analyzed using protocol analysis, which has been shown to provide a rich source of information to formalize understanding about semi-structured and intuitive knowledge.