From Access to Use: Premises for a User-Centered Quality Model for the Development of Archives Online

Abstract

Although the traditional mediation of archivists supplied the necessity of users in accessing archival records and documents, present archives online, i.e. digital environments offering archival content, often require specific competences to be browsed and searched. Differently from most digital libraries, their specialized, separated and hierarchic units of information are not easily accessible for non-expert users. No reference model is currently available to ensure quality to archives online in terms of user needs, experience and satisfaction, and rarely archival projects organize specific user studies to finalize language, interfaces and architectures. After introducing the state of the art and presenting the main issues emerging from user studies applied to archives online, this paper suggests key concepts and methods for creating a quality assessment model centered on final users' engagement, in view of going beyond the simple goal of accessing archives, towards the promotion of their effective use. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.