Design and Usability of Digital Libraries: Case Studies in the Asia Pacific

Citation

Calvert, P. (2005), "Design and Usability of Digital Libraries: Case Studies in the Asia Pacific", The Electronic Library, Vol. 23 No. 5, pp. 618-619. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470510631326

The editors have drawn the boundaries of the Asia‐Pacific region widely, with digital libraries from Indonesia, Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, and The Philippines included in this book. Authors come from several countries, including the USA, though Singapore and New Zealand are very well represented.

The book is divided into five sections, and no doubt each reader will find one or more of these sections especially relevant. Section I is a single chapter on the history of digital library development in the region, using papers from the International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries as source material. Section II contains four chapters on the broad topic of “Design architecture and systems”. The first of the chapters is a very good overview by Edward Fox and colleagues, and here Fox has enhanced his reputation for explaining complicated subjects in an easy style. This chapter includes discussion of interoperability, one of the subjects that practitioners often talk about but seldom put into practice. Chapter VI by Xing, Zeng, Zhang, and Zhou analyses techniques for information filtering used for personalising services, and they present their own research with the prototype TH‐PASS for personalised searching and recommending services.

Section III covers the topic most important to practitioners, which is obviously implementation. The first of these chapters by Ee‐Peng Lim and San‐Yih Hwang is fairly general in its content. Most of these chapters, however, are more theoretical in the sense that they discuss algorithms and other methods for matters such as metadata harvesting, searching and retrieval. Two of the chapters come from the University of Waikato (New Zealand) team that has done a great deal of theoretical work on information retrieval from full text, and these are the people that gave us the open source Greenstone digital library software.

Section IV deals with the “softer” topics of “Use and impact” though softer certainly doesn't mean easier. Ian Witten provides us with the benefit of his thoughts on current trends in the information environment, and discusses in some detail his desire to see digital library technology used for humanitarian reasons in the Third World. It is probably important to realise that Greenstone was developed with this purpose in mind, and that the software isn't an all‐purpose digital library. Although it can be rather hard going for those us without a legal background, the chapter on the multimedia digital library as intellectual property (IP) by Sasaki and Kiyoki is very important. Japan has always applied very strict IP regulation over the development of electronic resources and this is now starting to pay off, whereas China has to hold back on some developments while they catch up on IP.

Section V is on “Users and usability” and there are five chapters here, starting with a chapter by notable authors Christine Borgman and Edie Rasmussen on the usability of digital libraries in a multicultural environment. I liked Chern Li Liew's chapter on designing a digital library for Maori cultural heritage materials, which shows how a culture's specific needs for representation, organisation and retrieval of its own cultural information will make it necessary to alter the typical design of a digital library.

The last section is on future trends in digital libraries, and here the editors do a good job of summing up the issues, and they conclude that international cooperation is needed if we are to avoid the digital divide widening even further. It's a good book for those interesting in digital libraries, and readers should ignore the regional limits of its content and accept that what is said here applies to the international scene as well.