Lessons learned from evaluation of the use of the National electronic Library of Infection

Abstract

The National electronic Library of Infection (NeLI: http://www.neli.org.uk) in the UK is a freely available portal to key evidence and guidelines in the infectious disease field. This paper discusses 5 years of evaluation of the pilot library and how this evaluation informed design of the new library website. The importance of combining qualitative quantitative evaluation is highlighted and the results of web access logs analysis, free text search query analysis and an online user survey are compared. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned for future development and evaluation of this Internet digital library. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications.