Keywords

1 Introduction

Digital library (DL) refers to an online database of digital resources, including text, images, audios, videos, and other digital formats [1]. DL varies greatly in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations [2]. In recent years, along with more powerful archiving and information accessing technologies being developed, various academic institutions and professional associations have developed different DLs for hosting diverse published or online digital contents. However, technologies evolve fast, thus it is important for the DL community to constantly identify existing barriers from users and develop further improvement to the DL system.

As one of the oldest and the most authoritative web archives for computing literature, the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL) is a “research, discovery and networking” platform, containing the full-text collection of all ACM publicationsFootnote 1. It serves as a repository for high-quality literature on computing literature and provides rich interlinking relationships among authors, works, institutions, and special interest groups within the ACM community [3]. With the development of more accessible technologies and information technologies, the ACM DL has developed the new version of its interface [4] to provide a more user-centered interface and service.

Although this new version is still in trial stage, and there is not a large number of users accessing the information via this new version, the developers of the new ACM DL have been actively cooperating and discussing with the whole computing communities on how to enhance the new ACM DL system and its services. Therefore, we conducted a survey to investigate users’ current usage inside the existing ACM DL, including the motivations, goals, search tasks, access methods, the challenges, as well as the attitudes and needs towards personalized function about the recommendation, search, interface, and notification. We aim to find out users’ needs and obstacles through the survey results, and recommend improvements to the ACM DL via the new design.

2 Related Works

There have been many attentions to the DL users’ information behaviors in the literature. Researchers studied the users’ intents when using DLs, their information needs, behaviors, their desires which could influence the design of the DLs.

Marchionini, Plaisant and Komlodi [5] conducted a study of Library of Congress Digital Library’s interfaces. They proposed that DLs in large scale should consider the users’ different roles and tasks, and provide personalized user interface tailored for different users’ roles and tasks.

In addition, different groups of users have various activity characteristics in DLs. For instance, users can have different search strategies (such as using different retrieval fields) [6]. Researchers examined DL users’ clickstream data, and found out that users’ search activities are less exploratory [7]. Islamaj et al. studied the PubMed users’ needs and behavior, and found that the three main search fields used by the users are search by author, gene/protein, and disease. They also demonstrated that the analysis of users’ search preference could contribute to improving biomedical information retrieval [8].

Users’ DL needs on mobile devices became more personalized. Toms et al. argued that the research on DL should not only focus on users’ information search tasks but also users’ DL experience including the playfulness and pleasure, because the experience will affect the users’ willingness of using DLs [9]. DLs can analyze the users’ diverse preferences to establish user portrait through transaction log data, which can enhance their personalized services [10]. Franke et al. studied the recommendation algorithm based on the DL users’ historical log, and improved the recommend services of DLs [11]. Willson and Given compared the differences between searches on DL and searches on WWW. They found that DL users needed more user-centered interface design [12]. Others also stated that the personalized interface could meet different user groups with different search skills and preferences [13].

The research on the information needs and behavior characteristics of the DL users can effectively help the DLs improve services. Especially under rapid development of information technology, DLs should reform their services better. However, the existing researches have not focused on needs and barriers of ACM DL users. Through this research, we can provide suggestions for the development of new ACM DL.

3 Study Design

3.1 Research Questions

In this study, we focused on the different groups of users’ critical barriers in accessing the current ACM DL and the potential directions for improving in the new ACM DL. Consequently, the research questions in this study are:

  • RQ1: What are the obstacles in the aspects of information needs and information access methods inside the current ACM DL among different user groups?

  • RQ2: What are the users’ attitudes and needs towards personalized function to improve the DL’s services?

3.2 Questionnaire and Participants

As ACM DL’s users come from all around the world, we want to collect the responses from a wide range of users. This motivated us to adopt web survey via an online questionnaire as the data collection method. Although other qualitative methods like interview can help investigate users’ views in-depth, it is too difficult to recruit users from different regions around the world.

As shown in Table 1, the questionnaire is in English, and contains 25 questions that are divided into six different modules. These modules cover important aspects of information access and services in DLs. The online version of the questionnaire can be found at [14]. To align the research questions in this paper, the discussion here will mainly concentrate on the questions in module 1 and modules 3–6. We used the method of “snowball” to recruit the participants via social media and e-mail. The survey was published on a professional online survey service platform (http://wjx.cn).

Table 1. Question groups in the survey.
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In total of 157 valid questionnaires were returned. Among all valid responses, male accounts for 44.6% and female accounts for 55.4%.

More than half of the responses (54.1%) were between the age of 22–30. 80.2% of the responses were students, including undergraduate students (24.8%) and graduate students (55.4%). The responses from university faculty and staff accounted for 15.3%. Most of the responses received a college degree or higher. In terms of geographical demographics, the responses from East Asia accounted the most at 63.7%, followed by North America (15.3%) and Europe (10.19%). In this study, we mainly compared the differences among different regions, different positions (student and non-student), and different environments (academia and non-academia).

4 Results

4.1 Challenges in Information Access Among Different User Groups

The Needs for the Diverse Collection.

From the answers in the survey, 78.3% of responses indicated that users mainly looked for the PDF resources inside ACM DL. We conducted a further investigation on what formats do users want have beyond PDF in Q12. As shown in Fig. 1, different user groups have diverse format preference in the DL collection, but the majority want papers in HTML5 format. Users from East Asia and student group also showed high needs for papers in XML format.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Comparison of needs for diverse collection among different user groups.

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The Barriers to Information Access Process.

For many years, ACM DL has greatly benefited authors, readers, and researchers of the computing community. However, responses to Q14 still show barriers preventing users from accessing the information they want. Table 2 reveals that more than half users couldn’t find the relevant results when using ACM DL, and users find difficult to obtain certain elements inside papers (such as tables, figures, and datasets) too. Besides, other mentioned obstacles include confusing labels of subject areas (46.91%), difficulties to locate papers via links to SIGs (Special Interest Groups) (43.21%), and old labels of Computing Classification Scheme (43.21%).

Table 2. Barriers for information access inside ACM DL.
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Furthermore, we investigated the information access methods used by different groups of users when they looked inside ACM DL (Q13). As shown in Fig. 2, users still would like to use different information access methods, although the use of simple keyword search accounts for the most.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Comparison of information access methods among different user groups.

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Through analyzing answers to Q15, we find that users’ views about the access methods for ACM DL should be enhanced. As shown in Fig. 3, the major access barriers for accessing ACM DL are searching, including the simple keyword search and advanced search. Especially for users from Europe and East Asia, and users from academia, they had more complaints about advanced search. Besides, there are many dissatisfactions with browsing using different subject areas, browsing through SIGs, and browsing using ACM subject CCS.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Different users’ views on enhancing the access methods.

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4.2 Opportunities for ACM DL’s Improvement

In this section, we investigated different users’ attitude and willingness to the redesign and new features of ACM DL. Through Q19–Q21, the results showed that most users (64.9%) hold a positive attitude to personalized recommendation and search service, and majority of users would be willing to create a personal profile inside the DL using their email.

The Needs for Customized Interface.

When asked whether do users want to change the elements inside the webpage of ACM DL to customize the user interface, most users reported that they hope to change the position of navigational components. Specifically, the users from North America concerned about adding or deleting certain elements, while the users in East Asia and Europe focused on the font and navigation buttons in personalized user interface more. Results are shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4.
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Different users’ needs for the customized interface.

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The Needs for Personalized Search Support.

Further analysis showed that different groups of users all wished to get more personalized search support in the ACM DL. The questions about personalized search support are shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Users’ needs for personalized search support.
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Query terms suggestion is the most needed support (67.52%), followed by personalized ranking of the results based on the user’s search history (54.14%), browsing history (50.96%), and research interests (49.68%). In addition, most users hold welcome attitudes toward personalized recommendation based on their privacies (such as searching, browsing, and clicking history) when they accessed the ACM DL.

There are no obvious differences in the needs for search support among different user groups, except for the needs for multilingual information retrieval. The users from Europe (50.44%) and users from East Asia (47.69%) had more need for searching in their native language.

The Needs for Real-Time Notification.

In academic environments, most DLs have improved the contents recommendation based on users’ subscriptions. Through the Q21, most users preferred the recommendation about articles (85.99%), journals (70.06%), and conferences (60.51%). We compared the different groups of user’s needs about real-time notification through Q24.

From Fig. 5, the North America users needed the notification about upcoming ACM conference mostly (78.95%), but the users from Europe had more requirements about call for special issue (88.89%). As for East Asia users, they wished get more support about latest work related to their researches (69.31%). In total, the users from Europe and North America had more needs for real-time notification. Interestingly, the non-student users concentrated on latest work than the student users. This might be because most users from the non-student group are university faculty members.

Fig. 5.
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Different users’ needs for real-time notification.

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5 Discussions

This study investigated the different users’ information access barriers when using the current ACM DL, and studied their attitudes and willingness towards personalized features inside the new version of ACM DL. Our findings can help ACM DL understand the challenges they faced and the opportunities they can enhance the service level.

As for the challenges of ACM DL, users need more support about the collection format, not just the PDF files. ACM DL can enhance their access about various resources, such as the datasets, figures, and tables inside papers, and supplementary materials. For instance, they should provide more resources in HTML 5 format for users in Europe and users of the student group and academia group. It can help these users complete their information tasks better. In the aspect of information access methods, ACM DL should focus on functions of searching and browsing. Many users expressed that there were many barriers prevent them from accessing information successfully; for users in North America and Europe and academia users, the ACM DL should enhance its simple keyword search and advanced search.

The further improvement of the DL should be around the subject areas of ACM DL. When users want to get updated on some areas, naturally they look for particular subject areas. Even when people search for authors inside ACM DL, they may want to know other authors within the subject areas too.

In the redesign for the new version of ACM DL, there are also some aspects that ACM DL should focus. Previous work [5] proposed that the DLs should develop consistent interfaces that minimize disorientation. While, in our study, we found that users in different regions have different needs for user interfaces. Therefore, the ACM DL can consider developing a different style of user interfaces in different regions. Also, users from various regions have different needs about real-time notification; the ACM DL can provide more personalized notification and recommendation to improve the user’s interaction with digital resources in ACM DL. At last, ACM DL should enhance the multilingual information retrieval support for users in Europe and East Asia, which can attract more usage of ACM DL.

6 Conclusion

In this study, we published a survey about the usage of ACM DL. We compared the difference in information access among different user groups and investigated the different users’ attitudes and needs towards personalized function to improve the DL’s services. Through the analysis of results, we proposal some insights on how to improve the new version of ACM DL. The ACM DL serves diverse user communities and thus needs to develop appropriate interfaces for varied users and needs. The limitation of this study is mainly at the analysis of survey. Due to the design of the survey, we could not use statistical methods to examine the results.