EVALUATING DIGITAL LIBRARIES THROUGH PEDAGOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL CONCEPTS: THE CASE OF CIBO/ CERVANTES INTERNATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY FROM CERVANTES PROJECT

Bibliographic digital libraries play a significant role in conducting research and in several educational programs as a special requirement, or not, in a class. In the past few years, have started to move from closed to more open social platforms that had made the work to construct those projects more easily for those who do not have enough experience building web projects, neither as designers neither as programmers. The problem is that the concept of the project has to respond to some specific questions about the concept of education through the use of technology. In this, the director of the project has to face challenges (e.g. the information architecture more convenient for the project and what kind of content and technology could use to accomplish with the education goals). This paper will describe an approach to the definition of the process to evaluate Digital Libraries, using disciplines like Information Architecture and Usability to complement the main evaluation through pedagogical and technological concepts, with the main purpose to have better digital libraries. The investigation will run around to one project that starts as a part of a class course in the spring of 2008, in Texas A&M University, which was design and construct a prototype for a Bibliographic Digital Library for the well known Cervantes Project from Hispanic Studies of Texas A&M. As a result of that project, we have this website “CIBO/ Cervantes International Bibliography” (http://alnaja7.org/bibo/).
As a part of our methodology to construct that project, we decided to analyze some of the most important Digital Libraries resources that we can find on the web and which represents an important reference for academics projects, (e.g., WorldCat1 and MLAIB2) and open (e.g. CiteULike and Bibsonomy3) online bibliographies, and even we analyzed some other Digital Libraries projects, as World Shakespeare Bibliography, The Galileo Project and The Walt Whitman Archive.
The problem that we have to face at the moment to analyze those web sites is that we have to know exactly which elements (contents and technological tools) we should use to start to compare and analyze in order to describe much better the problem under the perspective of the concept of education. The goal is to have those concepts well determinate in order to evaluate and compare different digital libraries projects, and, in this way, start to define a better way to think in projects like that.
In this paper we will start to answer questions like how does it works those concepts of ranking, multi language, etc, on digital libraries projects? How effective are those in terms of education? Is something else that we have to know before to decide that those rankings give to users enough confidence to trust on it?
Maybe evaluation of digital libraries still is so technical, where only the functionalities able for projects like this are the sufficient to talk about an evaluation.