Usability of Digital Repository Software: A Study of DSpace Installation and Configuration

Authors:
Nils Körber;Hussein Suleman
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa 7701;Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa 7701
Venue:
ICADL 08 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries: Universal and Ubiquitous Access to Information
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Usability of the installation and configuration of digital repository software is a key factor for the implementation of digital repositories. Many universities, laboratories and companies want to place their collections online but the installation and configuration processes of digital repositories are sometimes time-consuming and unnecessarily complicated. This paper describes efforts to highlight usability issues while setting up and configuring DSpace. The focus of three studies that were performed was not end-user usability but usability of the administrative functionality. User evaluations performed on a recent version of DSpace were followed by participatory design of a tool to increase usability by abstracting away the lower-level details. Users agreed that such a tool would be suitably usable. Thus it was found that significant usability problems exist, but these problems may in fact be easily addressed.