Creators, composers and consumers: Experiences of designing a digital library

Abstract

Many systems form 'chains' whereby developers use one system (or 'tool') to create another system, for use by other people. Little work within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has considered how usability considerations propagate through such chains and yet in many situations the usability of systems is determined by design decisions made at one or more steps removed from the immediate developers of the system in question. In this paper, we relate our experiences of developing digital library components and collections to this notion of "design chains". This case study illustrates the necessity of looking beyond the immediate users to try to anticipate the needs of stakeholders elsewhere in the design chain. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.