Enhanced User Services to Improve the Usability of Digital Libraries

There is an abundance of information and research available online, which is ever increasing. Digital libraries provide a central portal to access different types of information but often lack the features to digest and analyse the information effectively. There is a growing demand for enhanced services that allow researchers to perform their tasks more efficiently. This project presents two sets of enhanced user services that allow users to interact with content in a digital library. Both systems were designed as web applications that can easily be accessed by researchers. Firstly, organise content by creating public and private reading lists. Public reading lists are recommenced to users to expose them to more potentially relevant content. The results indicated that private and public reading lists are effective tools for finding more relevant content and efficiently organising resources. Secondly, users wanted more visual-based interfaces in the search results of digital libraries, as well as the incorporation of animations. To help with better organisation and visual identification of ETD genres, we visualised the search results as colourful books, with each book having colours and imagery pertaining to their genre. Books would also humorously fall and bounce when a search was made. It was found that the vast majority of users greatly enjoyed the experience of using the visualisation compared to the existing global search and found it to be very useful for finding relevant search results.