This paper investigates the relevance of electronic resources and improved access for effective distance learning and continuing education. The descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. The total population of the study comprises 7,125 registered students of the National Open University of Nigeria. A convenience sampling technique was…

In an exploratory study, participants (n = 18) completed 11 usability tasks to assess ease of use of two Web sites, and then a Web site perception questionnaire for each. Participants rated both Web sites positively, but 25% and 36% could not complete all tasks; doing so required more than a minute to complete. (Contains 2 figures and 7 tables.)

In April 2007, the University of Washington Libraries debuted WorldCat Local (WCL), a localized version of the WorldCat database that interoperates with a library's integrated library system and fulfillment services to provide a single-search interface for a library's physical and electronic content. This brief will describe how WCL incorporates a…

Discussion of usability testing of Web interfaces for virtual libraries focuses on a usability study conducted at the University of South Florida. Highlights include testing instruments; discrepancies between actual performance and perceived performance; and the need to use plainer language and less jargon. (LRW)

Client/server computing and the adoption of the World Wide Web make it possible for academic libraries to build automated library systems that present locally mounted and remote resources through a common interface. This article recounts issues encountered by the Iowa State University Library as it undertook this process. (Author/LRW)

The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University has created a multi-terabyte digital video library consisting of thousands of hours of video, segmented into over 50,000 stories, or documents. Since Informedia's inception in 1994, numerous interfaces have been developed and tested for accessing this library, including work on multimedia…

This survey examined the home pages of 36 Australian university library World Wide Web sites. Reports were run on these pages, using a service that checks the HTML for validity and reports errors, a service that checks usability by the visually disabled, and a program that checks the HTML, corrects and reports errors, and improves efficiency style…

Relates the results of pilot studies of Internet use in academic libraries to the education of users in a digital library environment. Interviews users and information professionals and reveals a need to develop user education programs that emphasize types of digital collections, interfaces, hardware and software requirements, and…

Includes four articles that discuss the impact of academic libraries' shift to electronic journals on staff and costs; open citation linking for improved access and the Open Archives Initiative; development of global digital libraries, particularly between the United States and Korea; and retrieving documents from a digital library through a…

Discussion of CORE (Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment), a five-year research and development project at Cornell University (New York) that tried to make scholarly journal articles available in electronic form, focuses on the user response to the system. Highlights include interfaces, article viewing, printing, searching, conversion issues,…

This study used focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires to collect input for developing the Mann Library Gateway at Cornell University. This Web-based information system provides access to catalogs, indexes, directories, numeric datasets, full-text documents, and spatial files. Concluded that scholars would benefit from…