Collaborative digital library of historical resources: Evaluation of first users

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a collaborative digital library designed for secondary students, demonstrating its usability and engagement through initial user feedback and usage analysis.

Contribution

It introduces CoreDev, a testbed digital library for educational use, and provides initial evaluation data on its functionality and user acceptance.

Findings

Over 75% of users found the system easy to use

The digital library effectively reached its target student community

Positive feedback on functional requirements from 44 users

Abstract

This paper describes the digital library of historical resources, a research project which involves building a testbed for the purpose of developing and testing new collaborative digital library functionality and presents an initial analysis of the digital library's public use on the web. The digital library is modeled to focus on serving secondary students information needs in conducting history projects. As such, in the implementation of the digital library, the use of online resources would be an integral part of history project based learning activities. Students should be enabled to access digital resources, create and publish their own documents in the digital library and share them with others. As a testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. Over 75% of the respondents in the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. The beta tester demographics (n = 105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities.