Assessing Digital Library Services: Approaches, Issues, and Considerations

Over the last decade, there have been significant efforts to develop digital libraries. These efforts, however, largely focused on the building of the technology, telecommunications, and standards (i.e., metadata) infrastructures that enable digital libraries to function technically. More recently, the efforts include the building of digital content that populate digital libraries. Little attention in the development of digital library initiatives – particularly those funded by through national and international funding agencies – actually assessed the extent to which the digital libraries met user information needs, service quality expectations, facilitated outcomes, or add value in other ways. This paper identifies a number of evaluation strategies to assess digital libraries through a number of approaches that can yield a variety of data regarding the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of digital libraries. The results from these evaluation strategies can have a number of significant implications for the continued development of digital libraries.