Duncan Birrell

Digital Natives and Specialised Digital Libraries: A Study of Europeana Users

The alignment of user needs with the technical capabilities of modern digital libraries is an area attracting the interest of researchers and practitioners. Europeana, conceived with the intention of offering a single access point to European cultural heritage, has been developed in recent years with a continuous effort to identify and respond to the needs of a range of users. This paper presents a study of two user communities – young people and the general public. The study, conducted between October 2009 and January 2010, comprised a series of focus groups and media labs in Bulgaria, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. A distinctive aspect of this study is that it combines questionnaire-based and verbal feedback gathered from users with evidence of user actions whilst undertaking a well-defined task. The paper presents the context and the methodology of the study, and some of the data gathered within the study which helps to understand better the attitude of digital natives towards specialised digital libraries. The data analysis supports several conclusions: specialised digital libraries require strong advocacy to target the “digital natives” generation which tends to prefer general purpose search engines to specialised resources; young users are confident that they know how to use advanced search yet there is little evidence of their applying these skills in contrast to general public users; the perception of digital libraries differs in groups from different countries. The study contributes to the better understanding of some behavioural characteristics of users of digital libraries.

Match Point: Duplication and the Scholarly Record: The Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), and Its Findings on Duplication and Authority Control in OPACs and IRs

This article summarizes the methodology and findings of the Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), a project recently carried out by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). In the context of the Online Public Access Catalogs (OPAC) and the recent development of the Institutional Repository (IR) within Higher Education Institutions in the United Kingdom, it considers issues of metadata quality, name authority control, and standardized subject headings, as well as departmental and institutional workflows. It also considers duplication and scope overlap within institutions with more than one IR.

New evidence on the interoperability of information systems within UK universities

This paper will report on the key findings and implications of the JISC-funded Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), a 3 month project which investigated the interoperability of Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) within UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The aims and objectives of the project included: surveying the extent to which repository content is in scope for OPACs and the extent to which it is already recorded there; listing the various services to managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered by these systems; identifying the potential for improvements in the links from repositories and/or OPACs to other institutional services such as finance or research administration. The project combined quantitative and qualitative methods; primarily, an online questionnaire distributed to staff within 85 UK HEIs, purposive sampling and two in-depth case studies conducted at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow.

An Investigation of Information Systems Interoperability in UK Universities: Findings and Recommendations

This article reports on the key findings and implications of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS), a 3-month project which investigated the interoperability of Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) and Institutional Repositories (IRs) within UK universities. A series of detailed recommendations enumerate some of the ways in which they might begin to develop and support an interoperable systems landscape to the benefit of all key stakeholders. The project combined quantitative and qualitative research methods including an online questionnaire distributed to staff within 85 universities, desk research, and two case studies conducted at the Universities of Cambridge and Glasgow.