User-centric Evaluation of Cultural Heritage Digital Libraries: Three Case Studies

The paper addresses how user evaluations could help to adapt the digital libraries to the users. Three case studies will illustrate how a range of user communities within the art and cultural heritage domain were studied. The first one, within the project DiSCmap, studied the needs in digitised materials within the Higher Education institutions in the UK. The second one assessed the European digital library Europeana through a combination of focus groups and media labs held in four countries. This study was qualitative but gathered a range of quantitative data providing evidence of user behaviour (queries used; eye tracking data and data on the users’ performance on a standard set of tasks). The third one treats the user survey initiative held for the Italian Association of Librarians (AIB) portal, launched in the phase of its re-styling through a web questionnaire that collected more than 600 answers.