1. USER INTERFACE OF DIGITAL LIBRARY SOFTWARE
Om Prakash Samal
Dept. of LIS
Khallikote University, Berhampur
2. CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
USER INTERFACE
DESIGN OF UI
PRINCIPLES OF UI
EVALUATION OF UI
COMPARISON OF UIs OF DSPACE, GREENSTONE, EPRINT
SOFTWARE
3. INTRODUCTION
TRADITIONAL LIBRARY DIGITAL LIBRARY
• Librarians aim is to enrich and
organize the library collections so
as to enable users to locate
individual items easily.
• Users search the physical
catalogue or the online
catalogue(OPAC) and locate on
shelves.
• Librarians aim is to guide its users to
quickly identify the most reliable
and suitable digital items.
• Users directly search the digital
library and locate the items from a
single DL or from DLs located at
different physical locations.
4.
5. A function of the operating system that allows individuals to
access and command the computer.
User Interface(UI), the junction between a user and a computer
program.
An interface is a set of commands or menus through which a
user communicates with a program.
Visual part of computer application or operating system
through which a user interacts with a computer or a software.
It determines how commands are given to the computer or the
program and how information is displayed on the screen.
WHAT IS USER INTERFACE
6. NEED OF EFFECTIVE UI
A digital library is a large-scale, organized collection of complex
and dynamic multimedia information and knowledge, and tools
and methods to enable search manipulation and presentation
of this information and knowledge via Internet.
Since the digital libraries are running on the Internet and the
users are from different psychological, educational and social
backgrounds, the usage of digital libraries is varying from user to
user which entail the need of best user interface (UI).
7. DESIGN OF UI
It is the job of a user interface to make a program easy to use.
A good user interface should:
• Be attractive and pleasing to the eye.
• Be easy to use.
• Have all options clearly shown.
• Have clear warning messages when someone makes a mistake.
• Have online help and support.
8. UI PRINCIPLES FOR DL
Simple
Support
Familiar
Informative feedback
Prevent errors
Multimedia support
Pan and zoom support
o Accuracy
o Efficient searching with NLP support
o Support of semantic approach and RDF
technologies
o Multilingual support
o Platform independent
o Future plug-in support
9. EVALUATION OF USER INTERFACE
WHAT ?
• Evaluation is something we actually already do, but without
formally saying.
• Example : buy something, then decide good enough to buy
again.
10. WHY ?
• Help us to understand the user experience with the system and,
where there are difficulties, to find ways to improving it.
• Does the interface meet the usability requirements ?
• Why user unable to complete particular task very easily ?
• Whether the UI that has been developed for novice user is
acceptable to experienced users.
• To find out if the user like a particular design feature.
11. CRITERIAS TO EVALUATE
Easy to use
Interactive efficiency
Easy to remember behaviour
The frequency and severity of the error
The user satisfaction
14. UI OF DSPACE
This software is ideal for planning, building and managing digital
repositories for large institutions.
DSpace has been jointly developed by Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP) and distributed
under BSD Open License.
This software supports community/ collection-based content and work
flow submissions by different user communities
(http://www.sourceforge.net).
The first version of this software was started from 2002 and the latest
version is DSpace v4.2. The development of DSpace has clearly
defined rules and each user of the community can contribute to it with
new functions (http://www.dspace.org).
Therefore, DSpace is advantageous for academics and young
researchers to upload and manage their works by themselves.
18. UI OF GSDL
An international cooperative effort established in 2000 among three
parties namely New Zealand Digital Library Projects at the University of
Waikato, UNESCO and the Human Info NGO, Belgium has developed
and distributed this product.
GSDL can handle multilingual digital documents, with search and
browse facility under GNU General Public License (http://www.
greenstone.org).
Greenstone is meant for non-specialist users to produce single and
personalized collections.
Its model visualizes a ‘librarian’ who is creating collections from existing
resources by comprising both ‘items’ and metadata and distributing
them over the Web or on removable media (Witten, 2005).
19.
20. UI OF EPRINT
EPrints was created in 2000 as a direct outcome of the 1999
Santa Fe meeting that launched what eventually became
the OAI-PMH.
Prints has been developed at the University of Southampton
School of Electronics and Computer Science and released
under a GPL license.
EPrints is a Web and command-line application based on
the LAMP architecture (but is written in Perl rather than PHP).
