CHALLENGES IN EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES

One major area of library and information science research is the evaluation of digital library. The term „digital library” (DL) covers different applications and has been used interchangeably for digitized collections, e-journal platforms, network databases, library websites. As Chowdhury (2010) pointed out, „a modern digital library is a space – a centre of intellectual activities – with content, available in different forms and formats in a distributed network environment, as well as tools and facilities for user-centric access, use, interactions, collaborations and sharing”. In line with the growing number of operational DLs, there is also growing interest among researchers to investigate the quality of DLs (Agosti, Ferro, Fox, Goncalves, 2007; Gonçalves, Moreira, Fox, 2007; Kyrillidou, Giersch, 2005; Xie, Joo, 2010; Zhang, 2010). The overall quality of DLs is insufficiently studied and reported (Zhang, 2010), and DL quality and evaluation is a very underrepresented research area in the digital library literature (Gonçalves, Moreira, Fox, 2007).