[ieee comput. soc 2003 joint conference on digital libraries - houston, tx, usa (27-31 may 2003)]...
TRANSCRIPT
Cross-Cultural Usability for Digital Libraries
Nadia CaidiFaculty of Information StudiesUniversity of Toronto, Canada
Anita KomlodiDepartment of Information Systems
University of Maryland, Baltimore [email protected]
Abstract
The scope and reach of digital libraries (DL) is trulyglobal, spanning geographical and cultural boundaries, yetfew scholars have investigated the influence of culture asit pertains to the design and use of digital libraries. Thisworkshop will examine cross-cultural issues around the useand development of DLs, especially as they relate to sup-porting cross-cultural usability of DLs.
1. Aims and Objectives
The advent of information and communication technolo-gies (ICTs) is said to have precipitated the blurring of geo-graphical boundaries and made us into a ’global village.’Yet, few scholars have investigated the ways in which dig-ital libraries have been used across cultures. Previous re-search on the use of online public access catalogs [1] andInternet search tools [2] have shown differences in howusers from different cultural groups searched for informa-tion. These differences in behavior have implications forthe usable design of DLs.
Like any socio-technical system, a digital library embod-ies the values, beliefs and practices of its producers alongwith their broader social and cultural contexts. A user withdifferent sets of beliefs and assumptions about the organi-zation of the content, the categories assigned or the user in-terface design may find it hard to interact with the system.Lessons learned from cross-cultural usability and interna-tional user interface design are thus important for the designof DLs. Equally important is the study of the information-seeking behavior of users from various cultural groups.
The goals of this workshop are: 1) to increase aware-ness about the area of cross-cultural usability in the digi-tal library community, 2) to identify new tools, techniquesand methodologies for cross-cultural study of user behav-ior in DLs and international user interface design, and 3) toprovide a forum for generating new research directions andcross-disciplinary collaboration. The format will be highly
interactive. In addition to reviews of actual projects beingundertaken, attendees will be asked to contribute real ex-amples of successful (and/or poor) interfaces and websitedesigns. The outcome of the workshop will be the estab-lishment of a road map for this type of research, whichincludes the identification of key issues/questions aroundcross-cultural usability (e.g., user interface design guide-lines, methodological considerations, etc.). All informationwill be posted on the workshop’s website.
Papers will be reviewed by a panel of experts consistingof: Christine L. Borgman, UCLA, Andrew Dillon, Univer-sity of Texas, Austin, Elke Duncker, Middlesex University(UK), Elaine Toms, University of Toronto (Canada), NorikoKando, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, (Japan),and Preben Hansen, Swedish Institute of Computer Science,Kista (Sweden).
2. Workshop Organizers
Nadia Caidi is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty ofInformation Studies, University of Toronto. Her researchinterests are social and community informatics. She teachesand is involved in cross-cultural and comparative studies,researching the influence of culture on the creation, accessand use of information and its technologies.
Anita Komlodi is an Assistant Professor at the Depart-ment of Information Systems, UMBC. Her research inter-ests are at the intersections of human-computer interactionand information retrieval (IR). She is especially interestedin the design and usability of IR interfaces. She also re-searches the information-seeking behavior of users fromvarious cultural backgrounds.
References
[1] E. Duncker. Cross-cultural usability of the library metaphor.In Proceedings of the JCDL, pages 223–230, 2002.
[2] M. Iivonen and M. D. White. The choice of initial websearch strategies: A comparison between finnish and amer-ican searchers. Journal of Documentation, 57(4):465–491,2001.
Proceedings of the 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’03)
0-7695-1939-3/03 $17.00 © 2003 IEEE