Design of a Digital Library Interface from User Perspective, and its Consequences for the Design of Digital Scholarly Editions: Findings of the Fonte Gaia Questionnaire

A clear separation is made between digital scholarly editions and digital libraries, as the few digital libraries that provide digital scholarly editions exemplify. This situation might be related to the perception we have of these two resources, but also to design problems (visualisation of the critical apparatus for example) that seems to prevent us to consider digital libraries as interfaces for digital scholarly editions. The Fonte Gaia Bib digital library – a French-Italian project – is aiming at embedding digital scholarly editions in its infrastructure to propose an overview of Italian studies at the digital era. For that, we have chosen a User-Centred Design (UCD) approach to co-create the interface of Fonte Gaia Bib with its users. The first phase of this process has been a questionnaire launched in May 2016 and focused on users, services, and collaboration. The 67 answers collected showed shared practices among the users (e.g. reading, search) and underline a wish to be implied in the life cycle of digital libraries, through the improvement of its collections (e.g. tagging, OCR correction). By comparing these findings to the ones focused on digital scholarly editions, it appears that digital libraries and digital scholarly editions share similar characteristics that allow us to envisage a common interface for both resources