Discover Digital Libraries: Theory and Practice

Discover Digital Libraries: Theory and Practice is a book that integrates both research and practice concerning digital library development, use, preservation, and evaluation. The combination of current research and practical guidelines is a unique strength of this book. The authors bring in-depth expertise on different digital library issues and synthesize theoretical and practical perspectives relevant to researchers, practitioners, and students.

The book presents a comprehensive overview of the different approaches and tools for digital library development, including discussions of the social and legal issues associated with digital libraries. Readers will find current research and the best practices of digital libraries, providing both US and international perspectives on the development of digital libraries and their components, including collection, digitization, metadata, interface design, sustainability, preservation, retrieval, and evaluation of digital libraries.

Dr. Xie is a Professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has been actively involved in the teaching and research of digital library design and evaluation for about 15 years. Her research interests and expertise focus on digital libraries, interactive information retrieval, human-computer interaction, as well as user needs and user studies. She has received several research grants from research grant programs for the study of digital libraries. She is the principal investigator for the Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant "Designing Interactive Help Mechanisms for Novice Users of Digital Libraries” and for the Online Computer Library Center/the Association for Library and Information Science Education grant “Universal Accessibility of Digital Libraries: Design of help mechanisms for blind users.” In addition, she is one of the senior personnel on the National Science Foundation Grant “The Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Interactive Resource Center and Advisory Center." Her research projects range from the identification of types of sighted users and blind users' help-seeking situations in interacting with digital libraries as well as implications for interface design, digital library evaluation criteria and measures from different stakeholders of digital libraries, and social media applications in digital libraries. She has a strong publishing record in the field of library and information science. This book project is a natural progression in the active focus of Dr. Xie’s research, as she has conducted a series of highly cited studies on digital libraries, published numerous papers in top-ranking journals, and presented at several national and international conferences. Her book “Interactive Information Retrieval in Digital Environments” was published in 2008, and the subject of digital libraries is one of the main topics covered in the book.

Dr. Matusiak is an Assistant Professor in the Library & Information Science Program at the University of Denver. Her research interests focus on digitization of cultural heritage materials, indexing and retrieval of digital images, information behavior, use of digital libraries, and research methods. She combines practical experience in digitization and digital collections with research interests in use and evaluation of digital libraries. She has been involved in digitization of cultural heritage materials since 2001. Prior to accepting her position at the University of Denver, she worked as a Digital Collections Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she planned and designed over 20 distinct digital collections. She served as a co-investigator of the digitization project, funded by the National Endowment for Humanities, “Saving and Sharing the American Geographical Society Library’s Historic Nitrate Negative Images.” She also served as a digitization consultant for projects funded by the Endangered Archive Programme at the British Library and assisted digital library projects at the Press Institute of Mongolia in Ulan Baatar, Mongolia and the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in East Jerusalem. Her research projects include studies of information seeking behavior in digital collections, use of image and multimedia resources, and user interaction with large-scale digital libraries. She has published a number of articles on those topics and presented at national and international conferences. Dr. Matusiak contributes to this book her expertise in digitization, audiovisual materials, metadata, digital preservation, digital library management systems as well as her practical knowledge in building and managing digital collections.