Digital Libraries for General Audiences: Usage Patternsand Trends in Wisconsin's BadgerLink

Hong (Iris) XieSchool of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee,WI 53201 hiris@uwm.edu

Dietmar WolframSchool of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee,WI 53201 dwolfram@uwm.edu

Digital libraries represent a recent advancement for information access. They maymeet the needs of specialized audiences or, increasingly, general audiences in theform of state digital libraries. Covi & Kling (1996) broadly defined digital libraries “asa collection of electronic resources and services for the delivery of materials in avariety of formats. Digital libraries include personal, distributed, and centralizedcollections such as online public access catalogs and bibliographic databases,distributed document databases, scholarly and professional discussion lists andelectronic journals, other online databases, forums, and bulletin boards”(p. 672). Agrowing number of examples of state digital libraries exist including Wisconsin’sBadgerLink, the Colorado Virtual Library, and the Kentucky Commonwealth VirtualLibrary. Initial evaluations of the Washington (Efthimiadis & Bruce, 2000) andWisconsin systems (Wolfram & Xie, 2000) show the positive impact of theseservices to residents of their respective states. BadgerLink has become a vitalinformation resource for residents of Wisconsin since becoming available in 1998. Itprovides access to a range of regional and national information resources via theInternet and serves as a gateway to other remote resources. Of particular value toboth libraries and residents have been the full text database products produced byEBSCO and ProQuest. EBSCO provides access to a wide range of full text resourcesof both a general and specialized nature.

Introduction & Previous Research

The diverse audiences, content and developers involved in the process present challengesfor state digital libraries. As states scramble to bring digitized resources to their residents,

many technical and content issues must be dealt with in the design, implementation, andevaluation of state digital library services. One of the contributing factors in the success ofthe digital library as a useful service for the state and its citizens is addressing the needsand challenges of its users (Plummer & McNeeley, 1999). Understanding how users makeuse of provided resources will help developers and providers to better serve user needs.

Among all the usability factors, organizational aspects are considered to be among themost important for the development of digital libraries. Kling and Elliott (1994) introducedorganizational usability into digital library research, and modeled a set of players involvedin the design and usage of a digital library in a university setting. They further presentdimensions of organizational usability in three levels: individual organizational, andenvironmental. These dimensions relate to either the interactions among the playersassociated with digital libraries or the products of these interactions. The authors havecompleted a preliminary study analyzing organization usability for Wisconsin’s BadgerLinkservice based on the 1999 data (Xie & Wolfram, 2002).

Methodology

Among its many services, BadgerLink provides access to different full text databasesthrough EBSCO database subscriptions. The focus of this investigation is on databaseusage, which represents a key service of BadgerLink, by BadgerLink users. Vendor-basedEBSCO usage data previously collected in 1999 and 2001, representing six and eightmonths respectively, were analyzed with newer data for 2003 (eight months) and 2005(seven months). The earlier data sets represented time frames for earlier studies. To keepthe nature and seasonal characteristics of the data the same, similar time frames wereselected for 2003 and 2005. These differences in the time frame of each data required thatresults be averaged by month. Although logging features have changed over the six-yearperiod, the data fields collected were limited to those available for the full run. Data foreach year were processed in MS Excel. Data were summarized and tabulated based onorganizational users (primarily libraries or users associated with different types of libraries),session and query counts, and title requests from databases available through EBSCO.Organizations were categorized based on the type of library (academic, technical/2-year,public, special, school). The top 200 journal titles requested were categorized into tenbroad categories (arts & humanities, business & finance, education, government & politics,health & medicine, leisure & entertainment, news & commentary, reference, science &technology, social science & society). Outcomes were compared across the four timeperiods for changes in relative activity, topicality of resources requested, and organizationtype. Data from BadgerLink's ProQuest Newsstand subscriptions were also analyzed forthe period 2002-2005 and included title requests and feature usage.

Results and Conclusions

The number of databases made available and their usage has grown since 1999.Databases that cover interdisciplinary areas are most frequently used. The availability ofadditional databases that deal with health information in the more recent data sets has alsoled to more use in that area. Several shifts are observed in the distribution of topics (Figure1). While there are more requests for the areas of Education, Social Science & Society,and Reference, requests for Business as well as Leisure & Entertainment titles have gonedown. In terms of search features used for ProQuest resources, basic searching continuesto be the most frequently used method, but advanced and publication search options havebecome more popular over the past two years.

Figure 1. Resource Requests by Subject

Overall usage by all institutional types is up. However, the percentage of users affiliatedwith academic organizations continues to grow in terms of the percentage of sessionsconducted between 1999 and 2005, while public library and K-12 school usage hasdeclined over the past six years in relative terms. With increasing full text access toEBSCO resources, users across the different institution types are shifting towards morefrequent full text requests as opposed to abstracts only, especially for corporate/speciallibrary users. The number of searches conducted per session is also down across eachinstitution type. Reasons for this cannot be ascertained from the log data themselves, butmay be indicative of more effective searching to locate desired content.

The findings present the unique characteristics of state digital library usage across time.The multiple players involved in the development, promotion and use of state digitallibraries and their interactions influence the usage of state digital libraries. The selectedresources offered by the content provider, the current dependence on physical libraries forpromotion of state digital libraries, more home and work places access to state digital

libraries, and competition from other information systems such as comprehensive searchengines limit the audience to library users and limit to what kind of information they access.These factors may explain the observed increase in academic users and relative decreasein public and K-12 schools users. Similarly, relatively fewer Business and Leisure &Entertainment resources have been requested in recent years. As a result of thesefindings, a model of organizational usability of state digital libraries is needed based onlongitudinal analysis of their usage.

Acknowledgment

Our thanks to Sally Drew and the Wisconsin Reference and Loan Services Library foraccess to the log data.

References

Covi, L. M., & Kling, R. (1996) Organizational dimensions of effective digital library use:Closed rational and open natural systems models Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47(9), 672-689

Efthimiadis, E., & Bruce, H. (2000) A study of the impact of statewide database licensingon information provision in Washington State Proceedings of the ASIS Annual Meeting,63 pp. 47-59. Information Today, Medford, NJ

Kling, R., & Elliott, M. (1994) Digital library design for organizational usability SIGOIS Bulletin 15(2), 59-69

Plummer, T., & McNeeley, E. (1999) Providing a statewide digital library: A voyage ofdiscovery Reference Librarian 65, 103-110

Wolfram, D. & Xie, H. (2000) End user database searching on the Internet: An analysisof the State of Wisconsin’s BadgerLink service Proceedings of the Twenty-first National Online Meeting pp. 503-512. Information Today, Medford, NJ

Xie, H., & Wolfram, D. (2002) State digital library usability: Contributing organizationalfactors Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53, 1085-1097