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The purpose of this study is to identify usability issues on a storytelling digital library with six languages provided by the National Library for Children and Young Adults (NLCY) in Korea, and to provide suggestions for future improvement to create a better interface.

In this study, usability issues at the multicultural children’s book project Web site of the NLCY were identified, with comparison between the previous interface and the current one, based on the findings of established literature on children’s use of computer applications and web interface.

Suggestions for improvements include brighter colors, bigger fonts and graphics, more lively animation and sound, easier navigation, consistent interface, summary availability, better organization of information and labeling and multilingual searching and browsing function. A user study is being planned for future development.

There is a great value in making 400 children’s books available to the public at the NLCY digital library in six different languages with their original pictures animated and their stories performed in a storytelling mode. However, to provide more pleasant access to the valuable site, particularly for children users, there is much room for improvement in terms of the user interface. Based on these findings, a user study is being planned for future development, which should be more intuitive for users, particularly children.

This study aims to understand key features of existing multilingual digital libraries and to suggest strategies for building and/or sustaining multilingual information access for digital libraries.

A case study approach was applied to examine four American multilingual digital libraries: Project Gutenberg, Meeting of Frontiers, The International Children's Digital Library, and the Latin American Open Archives Portal. This examination used a framework derived from digital library evaluation practice. The missions, goals, funding, partners, users, collections, services, and technologies of these digital libraries were analyzed to present their key multilingual features. The collaboration and crowdsourcing characteristics were highlighted and discussed.

These four multilingual libraries benefit substantially, both in the creation of the library and in its access, from the collaboration of groups domestic and international with different language expertise. For building the multilingual collection and services, some libraries involved both staff and users. For multilingual access to the collection, however, none of the libraries used machine translation or cross‐language information retrieval technologies.

The four cases are all publicly available digital libraries in the USA. Their features may not be applicable to digital libraries in other countries or to commercial digital information services.

With the advancement of machine translation technologies and the wide application of social media, multilingual digital libraries may have even better opportunities to sustain their multilingual capabilities through crowdsourcing and the application of new technologies.

This study summarizes the key features of four existing multilingual digital libraries. It provides insights into important factors for building successful multilingual digital libraries. The suggested strategies may help digital library developers to design appropriate multilingual information access services.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Help features in digital libraries and identify problems related to their design.

This study selects six digital libraries to represent a variety of digital libraries developed or sponsored by different types of organisations. The Help features of these selected digital libraries are examined by their types (explicit versus implicit), formats (texts, images, screenshots, multimedia materials, and interactive formats), and presentation styles (descriptive, guided, procedural, and exemplary).

This study presents the types of Help features available in the selected digital libraries, and further characterises the formats and presentation styles of these Help features. In the process of analysis, the author also identifies six types of problems: lack of standards; tradeoff between using explicit Help and implicit help; tradeoff between using general Help versus specific Help; lack of interactive Help features; lack of dynamic presentation styles; and lack of Help features for advanced users and users who do not understand English.

In order to design Help features that facilitate users to effectively use digital libraries, further research needs to extend studies to what types of help‐seeking situations users generally encounter and the corresponding support they need.

This study provides insightful information regarding the current status and problems of the Help features in existing digital libraries.

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this article is to help those new to the practice of finding international children's books online navigate this exciting if confusing area of reference sources.Design/methodology/approach ‐ This article reviews the International Children's Digital Library that has revolutionized connecting children and books worldwide since 2002. However, there have been organizations busy identifying, evaluating, recommending and keeping lists and annotations of excellent international books for children since the 1940s. This article also reviews resources created by organizations, including the International Youth Library, the International Board on Books for Young People, international book fairs, Banco del Libro and other entities.Findings ‐ The article finds that, there is benefit to be gained from the expansion of international children's book resources into the world of the internet and that those who compiled both types of resource want to connect the world's children with quality literature.Originality/value ‐ This article offers information about historical context, partnerships, and hosting sites that have led to online access to many of these once print only resources. This review of these resources is original as it covers those who originated sources with the shared goal. That goal is their dedication to bring children and books together around the world and to build understanding and solutions together as members of a global community.

Together, increasing globalization and the internet created fertile grounds for the establishment of multilingual digital libraries. Providing cross‐lingual access to materials is of particular interest to political entities such as the European Union, which currently has 23 official languages, but also to multinational companies and countries that have different languages represented among their citizens. The main objective of this paper is to review the literature on multilingual digital libraries and provide an overview of this area.

Based on a thorough literature search in four different databases, a core set of literature on multilingual digital libraries was retrieved. Literature on various aspects of this topic was reviewed. The paper is organized based on emerging themes directly drawn from the literature. Where warranted additional literature is brought in to provide necessary background information or clarification.

Creating a multilingual digital library is a highly complex undertaking and typically requires a collaborative effort between different organizations and people with different areas of expertise. Enabling users to search across languages requires translation resources to cross the language barrier, which can be challenging depending on the language and resource availability. Additional challenges were found to be in data management (localization and language processing), representation (dealing with different fonts and character codes), development (creating international software, cross‐cultural collaboration), and interoperability (system architecture and data sharing). Research in multilingual digital libraries was mostly system based involving experimental systems or system prototypes.

Most likely the literature review does not include all possible journal articles on multilingual digital libraries even though the literature searches done to obtain these articles were thorough and deliberate. Journal articles without the descriptors used in this search and those articles not indexed in the four different databases used in the search will not be included here. The review excludes cross‐language information retrieval research unless it is directly related to existing multilingual digital libraries, or a connection to digital libraries in general is made in the paper itself.

This paper provides the first literature review on the topic of multilingual digital libraries and provides a concise overview of relevant aspects in this area. The number of multilingual digital libraries is growing, as is the interest from the research community in these libraries to apply their research findings from cross‐language information retrieval. This review article provides a valuable entry point to the field of multilingual digital libraries for researchers, practitioners, and other interested parties.

This study aims to explore young children’s information practices within the context of their individual interests, examining children’s interest-related information activities, challenges encountered and enablers received.

Participants included 18 children between five and seven years of age and their parents. Data were collected using a multi-stage participatory approach. Children shared their experiences via a book discussion, poster activity, participant-generated photography and a photo-elicitation interview. Parents provided information about family demographics and their perceptions of their children’s individual interests, information practices and digital media use via questionnaires. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method.

Young children seek information via print and digital objects, other people and experiences, and use information by applying it to their activities and sharing information with others. Challenges to information activities include children’s own capabilities and skills, constraints of information sources and parental restrictions on their activities. Enablers include affordances of technology and parental support.

This study takes a holistic approach to understanding young children’s perspectives of their information activities, examining information use and sharing activities in addition to information seeking.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of information seeking in digital libraries from the perspectives of the Technology Acceptance Model and flow experience, as well as the consequences from the perspectives of self-efficacy in getting information and individual performance.

A research model is developed and tested using questionnaires and, partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The effect of flow experience on information seeking in digital libraries is the largest one. Meanwhile, flow experience fully mediates the effects of ease of use and usefulness on information seeking in digital libraries which further leads to self-efficacy in getting information and individual performance.

Librarians should help users to experience more stable and sustainable flow by providing dependable, prompt, personalized and professional service to them. Librarians should try their best to provide diversified user training so as to guide potential users to seek information in digital libraries.

This study contributes to the theoretical development of the structural model exploring information seeking in digital libraries, presenting a new view for digital library research and practice alike.

This review aims to provide a snapshot of digital library research of the past 11 years (1997‐2007) that focuses on organisational and people issues, including those concerning the social/cultural, legal, ethical, and use dimensions.

The review covers articles published in mainstream peer‐reviewed library and information science/studies journals. The analysis was done by drawing on a sample of 577 articles published in both academic and professional LIS journals.

The analysis reveals that there are several topics that are dominant in the sample. There are significant research streams into one or more aspects of digital library use and usability, organisational and economical issues, as well as legal issues. In comparison, there is very little research in the sample that addresses ethical issues and social/cultural issues. D‐Lib Magazine tops the list as the journal with the highest number of articles published and in spite of some fluctuations, there was an overall upwards trend for journal publications in these research areas. The years with the largest numbers of works published in these areas in the study sample were 2004, 2005 and 2006.

It would be inaccurate to claim that the literature searches conducted in this study include every relevant journal article. They provide an extensive but not comprehensive sample. Also, to account for inconsistencies in indexing, a range of descriptors related to “digital library” was used in the searches in conjunction with other descriptors representing the various topics related to organisational and people issues. Nevertheless, this does not take into account journal articles that do not mention any of the digital library terms and yet, may discuss digital library themes. Hence, certain issues might have been under‐represented in this study.

This review and meta‐analysis is the first that focuses on analysing digital library research that has a focus on organisational and people issues. Given the manifestos that digital libraries are to grow into socio‐technical systems that function within an organisation and society, the subject area as a whole has also evolved over the years, with a move away from purely technical issues towards the application, use and effectiveness issues. Therefore, it is highly likely that research into these emerging issues will continue to grow and this review provides a preliminary overview of this important development as well as a point of departure to highlight gaps in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore children’s spatial cognitive abilities as they engaged in information-seeking behaviors on two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) digital interfaces.

Children between the ages of seven and 11 were observed as they browsed either a 2D or 3D navigation interface for a children’s digital library. Data regarding their use of the overview function and depth cues were analyzed to reveal the relationships between search performance efficiency, precision, and effectiveness and the associative memory, visualization memory, and spatial visualization abilities of the user.

Children spent less time using the 2D interface when compared to time spent using the 3D interface. Children exhibited better performance precision when using the 3D interface. Children applied exhaustive strategies and more varied cognitive skills across different tasks when using the 2D interface, and applied a more focussed approach when using the 3D interface.

The cognitive abilities of children are not yet fully developed, so they require a unique user interface when browsing digital libraries. This study served the practical purpose of developing a game-like user interface for ease of use. Providing an effective overview function allows young users with less developed cognitive abilities to navigate informational cues. They can then build an effective mind map and implement efficient way-finding strategies.