The Portal to Texas History℠ is a gateway to humanities collections within the digital library of the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries (http://texashistory.unt.edu). Currently, materials from more than 190 content partners are available and the number of partners continues to grow. While ever-increasing numbers of partners and assets are signs that digitally preserving and making resources Web-accessible is a desirable thing, universities, cultural heritage institutions, and funding agencies increasingly expect measurements that report the impact and value resulting from digitizing and preserving assets. Because the Portal is fairly unique in both the number and scope of its content partners, it serves as a good case study for measuring the impact of digitization for two key digital library stakeholder groups: content providers and users. This paper reports the initial findings of a study of the impact of digitizing assets, specifically: (a) a framework of impact areas and indicators, and (b) findings for the Portal's content partners and users.
The IOGENE project at the University of North Texas Libraries applied user-centered design principles to redesign the interface to a unique digital library of cultural heritage materials, the Portal to Texas History SM . Since its launch in 2004, the interface had become dated and implementation of new functionality was constrained by the underlying technical infrastructure. Genealogists, a significant and under-studied class of digital library users, participated in the redesign of the Portal's interface. At the outset of the project, focus group discussions provided insights regarding genealogists' information needs as well as their research practices in relation to online information systems. In large part, these insights informed the functional requirements for the redesign of the Portal's user interface. Subsequent to each of two public releases of the redesigned interface, genealogists were engaged in usability testing. An online survey measured user satisfaction prior to and after the new interface was released. Results determined that satisfaction with the Portal significantly improved after the final release of the redesigned interface. The project's process and findings will be of interest to archives and digital libraries facing similar challenges in regard to redesigning their user interface and involving users in the design process.
Chapter 2 INTRODUCTIONThe Portal to Texas History SM is a gateway to a significant set of humanities collections within the digital library of the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries (http://texashistory.unt.edu/). In collaboration with over 200 content partners, the Portal provides access to collections from Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and private collectors. The Portal archives and provides access to more than 165,000 digital objects, comprising over 2.3 million image files. Historic newspapers represent a large segment of the materials, with over half a million searchable pages dating from 1829 to the present. This significant collection is not only used in traditional research by scholars and lifelong learners, but also forms the basis for a collaboration between UNT and Stanford University in text mapping research that is exploring new methods for programmatically finding and analyzing meaningful patterns. Kathleen Murray University of North Texas, USA Mark PhillipsDevelopment of the Portal began in 2003 when the UNT Libraries selected a system vendor for its digital library, and, as is typical of many digital libraries, based design decisions largely on the requirements of librarians and what they imagined end users would need. When the reengineering project began in 2008, the number of unique visitors per month had grown from 1,000 in 2004 to over 20,000. This success was accompanied by operational and management challenges, which affected the Portal's content partners, users, and other stakeholders.Scale issues created by the continuous addition of content and the increased usage required constant attention and distracted the systems team from other areas of development. The underlying data model for both the digital objects and descriptive metadata were limiting the kind of items that could be ingested into the system. Development constraints associated with the underlying technical infrastructure also emerged. In particular, the design and implementation of new features and functions was limited by outdated software and changing vendor priorities. It was often not feasible to make interface design changes without programmatic changes in the supporting infrastructure.In 2007, a decision was made to replace the legacy asset management system with a digital library infrastructure and framework based largely on modern open source components widely used throughout the world. This approach distinguishes the UNT Libraries within the broader library community, in which libraries generally employ single-vendor, integrated systems for their digital libraries. Replacing the legacy system also presented an opportunity to include users directly in the design process.The UNT Libraries received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-06-07-0040-07) for a twoyear study (2007)(2008)(2009) to redesign the Portal's interface. At the outset of the project, an application development model was drafted to guide the project's work. The model employ...
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