Finnish National Library public interface

Abstract

The Finnish National Digital Library (NDL) project is a national project which improves online accessibility and usability of digital cultural heritage resources held by libraries, museums and archives in Finland by combining the services and collections of these organisations to a versatile user interface called the Public Interface. The Public Interface is an easy-to-use efficient one-stop shop for heterogeneous digital resources. The architecture is based on the idea of separating the user interface from back-end systems. The operational principle is to keep cataloguing of data and digital objects in the back-end systems while metadata is harvested and indexed into the Public Interface for easy and fast information retrieval. Understanding the end user needs has played a major role during the design process. Since the current portals are usually lacking in usability the aim of the Public Interface is to enhance accessibility of digital resources through high usability. (English)