Book Review: Digital Libraries and Information Access

Digital Libraries and Information Access. Edited by G. G. Chowdhury and Schubert Foo. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2012. 235 p. $99.95 (ISBN: 978-1-55570-914-3). Since their emergence more than two decades ago, digital libraries have been developed in response to emerging and evolving researcher access needs. Digital libraries themselves have been the subject of ongoing research primarily undertaken by computer scientists, information scientists, and librarians, in addition to researchers from other fields. The definition and model of a digital library have likewise been approached from many different perspectives throughout a growing body of literature specific to their study. Early definitions focused on considering a digital library as an organization that provides access to digital works and has some obligation to preserve these works. Today, digital libraries have in many instances grown in scope and purpose with various projects seeking to better understand user interactions, facilitate collaborative information seeking activities, and refine how metadata are ingested, integrated, and provided. Current digital library projects might address emerging legal, ethical, and policy issues pertaining to information access, incorporate new resource types such as research outputs and data, and take advantage of developments in information storage to optimize management and functionality. Literature about digital libraries has grown significantly since they became a research focus, with more than 8,000 conference papers and journal articles published to date, along with many books and other resources. Chowdhury and Foo have contributed a new reference monograph on the subject, international in scope, which includes citations of exceptional breadth and depth that draw from the now substantial extant body of literature published about digital libraries. In Digital Libraries and Information Access, the editors provide a compilation of investigations into topics that range from the foundations of digital library development (architecture and design, understanding user interaction), to current advocacy issues (understanding digital library needs in developing nations, fostering social inclusivity, supporting open access), to detailed case studies (aligning different approaches to subject metadata, assessing information access features across select digital library sites). Given its inclusive scope and the potential that each chapter offers for continued research exploration, this title could easily be used as a textbook for students of information science while still offering current digital library practitioners a useful overview of the state of digital library research today. Several chapters address the importance of better understanding user interactions in digital libraries, an area of growing research. In chapter 8, Wilson and Maceviciute note that the topics of usability and user studies have indeed expanded to compose more than a third of the literature on digital libraries. They note that researchers are increasingly focused on understanding both general and specific user activities along with design aspects related to their behavior and comparing different research methods to assess this behavior. They encourage further exploration of user interactions in digital libraries, especially as they assert that "the digital library seems likely to be the dominant form of organized information" (124). They suggest means for modeling user behavior in digital libraries beyond general models of information behavior, noting that the actions users take within a given digital library can be constrained by the interface and functionality with which they are presented. Chowdhury and Foo, in chapter 4, discuss the role that interface design has on user interactions and acknowledge that visualization techniques in particular hold great and unrealized potential for enhancing user interactions, especially as digital libraries expand to include more and different types of content. …