Introduction - criteria for assessment of digital library services

Library Trends, Fall, 2000 by Thomas A. Peters

Gorman, Ash, Lavelle, Lyman, Delcambre, Maier, Weaver, and Bowers implicitly suggest that any attempt to create and evaluate sustainable, useful DL public services must be premised on a deep understanding of how real people look for, make sense of, and manage information in real-life situations. For example, they explore how experts often create and use "bundles" of information (i.e., organized collections of highly selected information) to solve problems and maintain current awareness of situations. Bundles of information are created to help perform specific tasks. Digital libraries should incorporate computer-based tools for creating and managing bundles. This article describes aspects of a larger DLI-2 (Digital Libraries Initiative, phase 2) funded project, "Tracking Footprints in an Information Space: Leveraging the Document Selections of Expert Problem Solvers." When health care professionals (e.g., critical care nurses, resident physicians, attending physicians, pharmacists, and medical ethicists) are focused on gathering information that may help to solve a specific medical condition, they make explicit choices about which items to ignore and which items to examine more carefully. In particular, messy bundles are valued not only for their convenience, but also for their immediacy, portability, disposability, and flexibility. The authors note that, for many information seekers, finding a satisfactory solution that suffices is preferable to devoting substantially more time, attention, and effort to finding the optimal solution. They also question whether these bundles can be reused by the same person/team or others. The authors also explored how experts combine information into high level scripts that trigger retrieval of additional details from memory.

If a satisfactory set of DL services were being designed for this population, what would these services have to do? How could they improve on the paper-based versions currently being used? The authors also indicate an intriguing behavior that could be called ignorance, defined as the assertive decision and action to ignore certain information objects.

For Greenstein, a digital library "mediates between diverse and distributed information sources on the one hand and a changing range of user communities on the other." He makes a strong case for services as the distinguishing characteristic of a digital library. Because, in a digital environment, a library assumes responsibility for configuring access to a world of information, a digital library is known less for the collections it owns than for the networked information space it defines through its online services. Because the digital library is "evolving as the library's defining function and as such is developed with a view to its financial and organizational sustainability," assessing a digital library is a high stakes endeavor. Greenstein suggests that the emerging business-to-business economy for networked environments could be mimicked to supply a class of infrastructural DL services that are more effectively mounted on an institutional or even cross-institutional level. Lest we fall into the belief that assessing DL services is solely a professional prerogative and activity, Greenstein reminds us that there is a distinctive need for benchmarks that help users evaluate DL collections and services. Greenstein's article also reminds us of the symbiotic relationship between digital collections and digital library services.