Evolving Tool Support for Digital Librarians 171

Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenpermission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

Chapter X

Evolving Tool Supportfor Digital Librarians

Abstract

Usability in digital libraries is often focussed on end-user interactions suchas searching and browsing. In this chapter, we describe usability issuesthat face the digital librarian in creating and maintaining a digital library.The Greenstone digital library software suite is used as an example toexamine how to support digital librarians in their work.

David BainbridgeUniversity of Waikato,

New Zealand

Dynal PatelUniversity of Cape Town,

South Africa

John ThompsonUniversity of Waikato,

New Zealand

Ian H. WittenUniversity of Waikato,

New Zealand

David M. NicholsUniversity of Waikato,

New Zealand

Gary MarsdenUniversity of Cape Town,

South Africa

Sally Jo CunninghamUniversity of Waikato,

New Zealand

Stefan J. BoddieUniversity of Waikato,

New Zealand

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INFORMATION SCIENCE PUBLISHING

This chapter appears in the book, Design and Usability ofDigital Libraries: Case Studies in the Asia Pacificedited by Yin-Leng Then and Schubert Foo © 2005, Idea Group Inc.

172 Nichols, Bainbridge, Marsden, Patel, Cunningham, Thompson, Boddie & Witten

Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenpermission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.

Introduction

Usability in digital libraries (DLs) often concentrates on end-user interactions.In this chapter we describe the evolution of tools to support the other importantclass of DL user: the digital librarian.As libraries have become more computerised, librarians have had to learn moreand more about computer systems, file formats and Web servers. The Green-stone software development team has, over several years, developed a varietyof tools to abstract away from these technical details to simplify the tasks ofcreating and maintaining digital collections.Tasks supported by these tools include: collection creation, metadata assign-ment, collection interface design and multilingual interface support. We outlinethe history of Greenstone, the role of the digital librarian and how the tools haveevolved to meet the needs of Greenstone’s users.

Background

Greenstone is a tool to simplify the construction of digital libraries (Witten,Boddie, Bainbridge, & McNab, 2000; Witten & Bainbridge, 2003). As with manytools, it hides the complexity of the task from its users. A digital library can beunderstood at several levels, from a sequence of ones and zeroes to a wholelibrary: as tool designers the problem we face is which levels are appropriate foruser interaction. As Greenstone has developed and the user base has expandedthe tools have changed to more easily support the work of digital librarians.Discussions of usability and digital libraries (e.g., Borgman, 2003; Blandford,2001; Keith, Blandford, Fields, & Theng, 2002) usually focus on the end-users— the users that search the collections for information. The influence of DLcreation tools on user studies is rarely discussed, yet the tools completely delimitthe possible experiences of the information searchers. If the digital librarians findtheir tools hard to use then they are unlikely to be able to produce high qualityDLs. The problem for the Greenstone developers is thus much harder: designGreenstone so that digital librarians can use it to produce easy-to-use digitallibraries.The earliest versions of Greenstone contained content-based abstractions, suchas documents and collections, that are drawn from library and informationscience (LIS). These concepts have remained relatively static throughoutGreenstone’s development. In contrast, the DL creation tools have evolvedthrough several versions; largely to enable collection creators to work without

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