USER EVALUATION - SUMMARY OF THE METHODOLOGIES AND RESULTS FOR THE ALEXANDRIA-DIGITAL-LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY-OF-CALIFORNIA AT SANTA-BARBARA

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is one of the six digital library projects funded by NSF, DARPA, and NASA. ADL's collection and service s focus on geospatial information: maps, images, georeferenced data se ts and text, and other information sources with links to geographic lo cations. Throughout the project, user feedback has been collected thro ugh various formal and informal methods. These include online surveys, beta tester registration, ethnographic studies of ADL users and poten tial users, target user group focus sessions, and user feedback commen ts while using the interfaces. This paper briefly describes the evalua tion studies conducted and what was learned about user characteristics and about the study approaches themselves. User reactions to the ADL interface and to the functionality and content of ADL are summarized. Finally, the value of these findings to design and implementation deci sions is considered.