Collaborative digital library of historical resources: Evaluation of first users
This is an incremental project for secondary students and educators to enhance history project-based learning through digital collaboration.
The paper tackled the development and evaluation of a collaborative digital library for historical resources aimed at secondary students, reporting that 75% of users found it easy to use and it received positive feedback from 44 users.
This paper describes the digital library of historical resources, a research project which involves building a testbed for the purpose of developing and testing new collaborative digital library functionality and presents an initial analysis of the digital library's public use on the web. The digital library is modeled to focus on serving secondary students information needs in conducting history projects. As such, in the implementation of the digital library, the use of online resources would be an integral part of history project based learning activities. Students should be enabled to access digital resources, create and publish their own documents in the digital library and share them with others. As a testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. Over 75% of the respondents in the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. The beta tester demographics (n = 105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities.