Evaluating digital libraries: A sociotechical approach

✍ Scribed by Michael Khoo

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 68 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0044-7870
• DOI: 10.1002/meet.14504301236

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL: http://www.nsdl.org) is an NSF‐funded program that supports the creation and dissemination of digital educational resources for all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. NSDL is conducting a program‐wide evaluation of all its activities since the program's inception in 2000, with the aim of inventorying achievements to date, and identifying directions for future development. The scale, complexity and distributed nature of the NSDL program pose significant challenges for this evaluation work. This poster outlines a sociotechnical theoretical framework, the ‘resource lifecycle,’ that is being used to guide the evaluation of the NSDL program, and to represent evaluation findings to internal community members and to external partners such as NSF. The poster describes the theoretical underpinnings of the model and outlines some of the early evaluation results obtained from using the framework.