Bonolo

To determine the overall success of the Curator Interface user and performance evaluations were conducted.

User Evaluation

User evaluation was performed to get feedback on how users felt about the experience provided by the Curator Interface when managing collections. This was done to address the research questions one and three relating to the usability and comparability of the Curator Interface.

20 users participated in the user evaluation. Each user was provided with a handout containing: a consent form; a set of tasks to be performed; and questions about each task. The feedback provided by the users was then analysed so that it could be used to answer the appropriate research questions.

The results of the user evaluations indicated that the experience provided by the Curator Interface, as well as its usability is acceptable. Thus, using a simple file hierarchy did not have an effect on usability, except in the case of editing metadata. However, further development focussed on this issue should provide a solution. The results of the user evaluation also showed that the Curator Interface is comparable to other digital repository management systems.

Performance Evaluation

Performance evaluation was done to determine the response time of the Curator Interface, as well as the amount of data being sent from the server to the client. These measures determine the Curator Interfac's performance, as well as how responsive it will feel to the users.

To evaluate the performance of the Curator Interface, the navigation feature was used as it is the most process intensive feature and therefore the choke point of the system. Both standard-case and special-case evaluations were undertaken. This was done to see how the Curator Interface responds under normal conditions, as well as how flexible it is. In both cases, the number of files in the collection was increased exponentially (1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384) but the directory structure containing the files differed.

The results of the performance evaluation showed that the performance of the Curator Interface was not compromised while using a well structured file hierarchy. However, the special-case testing showed that there is a negative impact on performance if there are large amounts of files in a single directory as it would take 9 seconds to load a single directory containing 16384 files.