Evaluation of digital libraries: an insight into useful applications and methods

Modern digital libraries have to address multiple diverging requirements and expectations of users and at the same time accommodate the rapidly changing technological novelties. The concepts of value, impact and user engagement of digital resources are discussed vigorously and in the current economic climate will be of even greater importance. Evaluation becomes a key activity in examining the extent to which a digital library provides content of high quality and services that match users' expectations and needs. The soundness of the digital library's underlying architecture is also an aspect subject to scrutiny. Evaluation is instrumental in comparing electronic resources: in this time of information, deluge helping the users to know which resource is better and in what particular way, is essential.

For these reasons, this edited collection on evaluation of digital libraries will definitely attract the interest of professionals working on digital resources. Practitioners from the digital library domain need sound consolidated guidance on evaluation methods and techniques because such guidance is currently dispersed between multiple publications, and although many provide an overview of evaluation (Fuhr et al., 2007), the content is generally insufficient to enable planning and implementation of a thorough step‐by‐step evaluation. To some extent, this is because evaluation of digital libraries is a domain which is still under development; it also is a vast domain addressing a range of machine‐ and human‐centric issues – and each of them is complex; for example, user evaluation is a domain in its own right with specific methodologies.