THE USER PERSPECTIVE OF THE ELINOR ELECTRONIC LIBRARY

The electronic library is emerging as the library of the foreseeable f uture but its user aspect, particularly the usability, requires more r esearch. This article describes the ELINOR (Electronic Library and Inf ormation Online Retrieval) developments at De Montfort University from the user's perspective. It firstly shows the main features of the ELI NOR user interface which illustrates how a user can find a document in the Electronic Library and subsequently read the retrieved document o n the screen. This is then followed by a discussion of the methodology and findings of a user study based on a random sample of eight ELINOR users conducted in the Autumn term of 1993. The user study included s earching/reading/browsing tasks and a questionnaire. The former is a c ontrolled experiment designed to gauge objectively the usability of EL INOR by comparing the use of the electronic books with that of printed books. The questionnaire shows the user's subjective reaction to ELIN OR. Future work on the user study will expand the sample to include al l the first- and second-year students doing the Business Information S ystems Course at the University 's Milton Keynes campus.