Flexible Design for Simple Digital Library Tools and Services

Phiri, Lighton and Suleman, Hussein (2013) Flexible Design for Simple Digital Library Tools and Services, Proceedings of SAICSIT '13 2013 South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists, October 2013, East London, South Africa, 160-169, ACM.

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Abstract

The design of Digital Library Systems (DLSes) has evolved over time, both in sophistication and complexity, to complement the complex nature and sheer size of digital content being curated. However, there is also a growing demand from content curators, with relatively small-size collections, for simpler and more manageable tools and services for managing content. The reasons for this particular need are driven by the assumption that simplicity and manageability might ultimately translate to lower costs of maintenance of such systems. This paper builds on previous work in order to assess the flexible nature of the proposed design approach ---the explicit adoption of a minimalistic approach to the overall design of DLSes. A two-axis evaluation strategy was used to assess this proposed solution: a developer-oriented survey assessed the flexibility and simplicity; and a series of performance benchmarks were conducted to assess the scalability. In general, the study outlined some possible implications of simplifying DLS design; specifically the results from the developer-oriented user study indicate that simplicity in the design of the DLS repository sub-layer does not severely impact the interaction between the service sub-layer and the repository sub-layer. Furthermore, the scalability experiments indicate that desirable performance results for small- and medium-sized collections are attainable.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Additional Information:	This research was partially funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant numbers: 85470 and 83998) and University of Cape Town. The authors acknowledge that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are that of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	digital libraries, dspace, minimalism, simplicity
Subjects:	Information systems > Information retrieval
Alternate Locations:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2513456.2513485
Date Deposited:	07 Oct 2013
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:33
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/891

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