Evaluation Insights to Key Processes of Digital Repositories

Abstract

Digital repositories are considered essential information tools for scholarly communication. Their acceptability and extensive use by communities and institutions, as well as the users’ commitment in self-archiving, highlight the need for developing alternative channels of communication to expose scholarly productivity. Furthermore, the digital repositories community is interested into transforming them into viable, reliable and useful systems. This interest is primarily expressed by intense research activity, including - among the others - the evaluation and the usability of the technological solutions that support these services. On an institutional level, digital repositories are systems supported by physical organizations, such as libraries, which undertake many tasks in order to enable a variety of processes associated with these systems, such as submission, editing and access. In this paper, we present a multifaceted evaluation initiative that aimed at the redesign of University of Patras’ institutional repository, namely ‘Nemertes’. ‘Nemertes’ is operating on a DSpace installation and the ‘Theses and Dissertations’ collection was placed at the center of evaluation as the most important collection accommodated in the service. Emphasis was given to key processes held inside the repository by conducting surveys and interviews with typical classes of users. In order to collect data from these sources three different studies were held. First the quality of Submission process inside the physical and the digital space was evaluated through a questionnaire survey, which was addressed to people who had earlier submitted in the ‘Theses and Dissertation’ collection. Secondly, the information retrieval processes and the interface were evaluated by Human-Computer Interaction savvy students using the usability heuristics principles. Finally, the Editing processes and the quality of the delivery of services were assessed through interviews with the librarians that support the service. The findings of these studies point to areas that the system can be improved and help to eliminate the barriers that prohibit the service to be upgraded and host new collections. The areas identified concern both the way of delivering the service and the operation of the system.