Alexandria digital library: User evaluation studies and system design

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is one of the six digital library proj ects funded by NSF, DARPA, and NASA. ADL's collection and services focus on information containing georeferences: maps, images, data sets, text, and o ther information sources with links to geographic locations. During this st udy period, three different user interfaces were developed and tested by us er groups. User feedback was collected through various formal and informal approaches and the results fed back into the design and implementation cycl e. This article describes the evolution of the ADL system and the effect of user evaluation on that evolution. ADL is an ongoing project; user feedbac k and evaluation plans for the remainder of the project are described.