The unseen and unacceptable face of digital libraries

Organizational communication and awareness: a novel solution for health informatics

As organizations grow larger and more distributed, the problems of maintaining corporate awareness and effective communication channels escalate. The clinical domain poses particular challenges to maintaining good corporate communications because users have limited time to access information and often have negative technology perceptions. This article highlights how a screen saver application, initially designed to increase privacy and security, developed into a new communication medium improving corporate communication across the organization. An ethnographic study of the application within a hospital setting, analysed using grounded theory methods, details the iterative and organic development of the design through ‘community of practice’ involvement. This application and the evolutionary process through which it was developed were found to not only increase awareness of resources, activities and hospital changes but also positively influence users’ perceptions of, involvement in and ownership of general IT developments. User involvement also raised the importance, for the designers, of application usability, quality and aesthetics.

HDLalert – a healthcare DL alerting system: from user needs to implementation

In the health domain, there are many circumstances where clinicians (i.e. doctors, nurses, allied health professionals) and patients wish to track changes in medical knowledge. However, existing ‘news’ or ‘alert’ services provide relatively limited means for selecting which information to receive. The result is that clinicians and patients often receive information that is inappropriate, irrelevant or simply too much. In this paper, we detail alert-relevant findings from several international user studies (e.g. UK, Germany and New Zealand) incorporating both clinical staff (across several hospitals) and patients’ perceptions. These findings demonstrate the importance of context, in terms of both the user's task and immediate environment. We introduce a novel alerting architecture that can provide a finely tailored stream of alerts to the user, and provides further support to assist the interpretation of received material.

Mastering Digital Libraries in the Digital Age

This chapter gives an overview of digital library topics: digital libraries and information architecture; digital libraries and electronic learning (e-learning); digital libraries and the Semantic Web; digital library evaluation; digital libraries and service quality; and the significance of digital libraries in the digital age. The Internet and the World Wide Web provide the impetus and technological environment for the development and operation of digital libraries in the digital age. Digital libraries comprise digital collections, services, and infrastructure to educationally support the lifelong learning, research, and conservation of the recorded knowledge. Whereas traditional libraries are limited by storage space, digital libraries have the potential to effectively store much more information and documents, because digital information requires very little physical space to contain them. Encouraging digital libraries has the potential to improve academic library performance and gain educational goals in the digital age.