Evaluation criteria and appropriate measures are critical to the success of digital library evaluation. The key problem is a lack of specific measures, especially from a heuristic perspective, corresponding to diverse dimensions and criteria. This study explored a variety of measures for digital library evaluation focusing on their appropriateness.
The legacy of early digital editions and their related scholarship reveals the textual foundation of digital literary studies, a foundation that emphasized form and materiality, in effect a representational rather than interpretative view of text. Early digital editions were formed out of a “whole text” approach, a cohesive print-to-digital model that features interrelated textual materials, often in print book form, rather than an expansive and fragmented representation of text, as is increasingly the case with data-based practices. This article examines the ways in which the digital edition privileges the structure of the book, which is viewed as a self-contained entity with a naturalized means for displaying knowledge and replicated in most aspects of creating digital editions, from display to data treatment.
This article presents the Digital Reference Research agenda developed as a result of a three-day symposium at Harvard University. It shows how the research agenda ties directly to digital reference and library practice and argues that research and practice must connect on a meaningful level in order to prevent unusable research and untestable practice.