The relation between the construction of a digital library and user needs. An interview study at the Gothenburg University Digital Library.

The aim of this thesis is to define digital library, and to investigate a relation between the construction of a digital library and user needs. The main questions to be answered are: 1 What criteria was used when constructing a digital library, particularly concerning issues like purpose, function, design, supply, services, resources and future development of the digital library? 2 How do the digital library system designers and system builders criteria correspond with those of postgraduate researchers? And what factors affect the use? A digital library is an enterprise that gives access to information stored digitally and directly available on the net. The crucial is that the enterprise has a control over collection of information and responsibility to make it available to a defined group of users. In order to investigate the relation between the construction of the digital library and user needs, I have interviewed five key people involved with the work with the digital library and twenty postgraduate researchers from the Gothenburg University. The study shows that supply, field of research, individual user needs and work habits, together with the financial resources of a specific university department are factors that strongly effect the degree of user satisfaction among the postgraduates. The system constructors and many users had slightly different opinion regarding the design, supply, information search and retrieval. Some users want more user-friendly systems, especially regarding function, design and information supply. The system constructors see the need but have little influence over e.g. suppliers. The system builders find out about user needs in a number of ways and meet the various requests of the users.Uppsatsnivå: