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Usability, functionality, and accessibility testing of digital library information services and products is essential for providing high quality services to users. This paper aims to detail a long‐term, evolving effort to develop meaningful evaluations for assessing digital libraries.

A multi‐year study to determine appropriate evaluation techniques, tools, and methodologies for the Florida Electronic Library (FEL) and other digital library efforts. The evaluation protocols and approaches were designed iteratively over time through assessment efforts with other digital library initiatives and with multiple versions of the FEL. The research described in this paper relies on a combination of functionality, usability, and accessibility evaluation strategies applied iteratively to assess libraries from the perspective of patron needs.

By combining these three methodologies, the researchers found that they were able to create a rich and robust evaluation of digital libraries, accounting for needs of diverse user populations. These methodologies can provide detailed evaluations of the extent to which information and services are comprehensible for all users, the extent to which the features and functions necessary to provide library functions operate properly, and the extent to which the digital library meets the needs of a diverse population of users.

This paper aims to demonstrate the potential roles of multiple, iterative evaluation strategies in the development and refinement of digital libraries; details the methodologies that focus on how the services meet the needs of users; and encourages further discussion of the uses of these multiple evaluation approaches in assessing these libraries.

OWING to the comparatively early date in the year of the Library Association Conference, this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD is published so that it may be in the hands of our readers before it begins. The official programme is not in the hands of members at the time we write, but the circumstances are such this year that delay has been inevitable. We have dwelt already on the good fortune we enjoy in going to the beautiful West‐Country Spa. At this time of year it is at its best, and, if the weather is more genial than this weather‐chequered year gives us reason to expect, the Conference should be memorable on that account alone. The Conference has always been the focus of library friendships, and this idea, now that the Association is so large, should be developed. To be a member is to be one of a freemasonry of librarians, pledged to help and forward the work of one another. It is not in the conference rooms alone, where we listen, not always completely awake, to papers not always eloquent or cleverly read, that we gain most, although no one would discount these; it is in the hotels and boarding houses and restaurants, over dinner tables and in the easy chairs of the lounges, that we draw out really useful business information. In short, shop is the subject‐matter of conference conversation, and only misanthropic curmudgeons think otherwise.

OUR readers may be amused this month by the microfilm imaginings of our correspondent in “Letters on Our Affairs,” but there is undoubtedly a more marked disposition now than formerly to reduce to a mechanism many of the usual routines of libraries. We suppose routine is always mechanical, is repetitive and, for the enterprising ambitious library worker, a matter of boredom. How far the “electronic brain” and other more recent developments of science can be adapted to our simple processes remains to be seen, but all experiment is good even if it does not survive the initial stage. What is to be most feared in any profession is the standardizing inflexibly of its techniques ; that way lies its old age, perhaps its petrification. It is for this reason that we welcome such things as those we have already discussed at times in our pages—the central cataloguing experiment of Harrods, the punched‐card vouchers and other records sponsored (so far as libraries are concerned) by Mr. T. E. Callender, the highly mechanised method of classing propounded by Dr. Ranganathan, the placing of D.C. numbers on the title pages of the books they publish by Jonathan Cape and Harrap, the visible fines receiving box and many more such things. No one uses them all. They free librarians, it is urged, for more specifically library service. We hope that they do. We have always before us the undoubted truth that the good man scraps methods that are obsolescent and the librarian (if one now exists) who is not a business man—especially if he is charged with a large library—is a somewhat pathetic person.

THOSE who were present at the induction of the President of the Library Association on January 26th must have left that pleasant, but very limited, assembly with two thoughts ; that the speeches were adequate and deserved a much wider audience than the relatively small Council Chamber at Chaucer House can accommodate, and that our affairs are in good hands for 1949. Mr. McColvin made the speech of thanks to Mr. Nowell, as a man straightforward, sane, loyal, simple, broadminded and fundamentally sound. We echo these and could add other praises but, fortunately, Mr. Nowell has many years of active service ahead, and we hope for many opportunities yet to acknowledge it. Sir Ronald Adams showed that modesty and charm which we were assured from his record he possesses. Our readers have found these speeches in the L.A. Record for February, and our only purpose in alluding to them is to say our own word of thanks for past service and our good wishes to both outgoing and incoming Presidents. And again to repeat our view that the Association loses a great ceremonial opportunity by holding the inauguration in a small room in London in the winter, rather than at the great annual assembly of the Conference as was at one time the practice. It was the central occasion of the year.

AT the very outset of this paper it is necessary to make clear that it is not an attempt to compile an exhaustive bibliography of literature relating to special librarianship. Neither space nor time permit this. In fact, the references given can only claim to be a sample of the wealth of material on the subject and this paper is submitted in the hope that it will stimulate others to more scholarly efforts. Reference numbers throughout this paper refer to items in the ‘Select list of references to the literature of special librarianship’, section 2 onwards.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.