A User-based Measure in Evaluating Academic Digital Library

High demand in acquiring online academic materials, digitization of education and research materials is just not enough. Beyond that, the needs of accessing and retrieving information through the network environments has made digital library to be the right answer and choice for many. Academic digital library appears to find its niche in the world of academic society resulting dramatic changes in learning and researching environment. Like any other digital libraries, academic digital library should be evaluated so that institutions can understand how useful their academic digital libraries are to their domain of users. Literature shows that usability evaluation is in fact one of the most applied user-based approaches in evaluating digital library. It may lead and can result in improvements to system’s interface. This paper reviews the literature on evaluating digital library via usability evaluation, its models and dimensions. Despite of different methods in usability evaluation study, the selection of method depends largely on the aim of the evaluation, also on aspects like the nature of the system, the targeted users and also the contents. The literature revealed that evaluating based on the aspect between user and system’s interface, and between users and system’s performance may not embrace the entire objective of usability evaluation. Another user-based measure is by taking into consideration on the aspect on how the digital library can suit with users’ work or academic environments.