Patron-augmented digital libraries

Digital libraries must offer more than advanced collection maintenance and retrieval services since the ultimate goal of a library, whether physical or digital, is to serve the scholarly needs of its users—whose objectives are not solely the retrieval of library artifacts. Users instead seek these artifacts in order to manipulate and combine them to produce new artifacts. Traditionally, these activities have occurred mainly in physical media (predominantly paper), and may be classified as paper-based scholarship . Digital libraries however provide new service opportunities as well as an expanded set of informational data types and have the ability to promote digital scholarship. Patrons are able to perform their scholarly work electronically, working entirely with digital media. Specifically, patrons are able to acquire library artifacts, organize these artifacts to form coherent structures suitable to the task at hand, author new artifacts, and publish new artifacts electronically for future use.; This research proposes patron-augmented digital libraries as a class of digital libraries that supports the digital scholarship of its patrons. A patron-augmented digital library (PADL) is one in which librarians and patrons both contribute to the evolution of the library's holdings. Librarians populate the digital library with artifacts that meet the goals of the library while patrons augment the collection with new artifacts such as annotations, original compositions and organizational structures.; This research begins by developing a framework for PADLs through the establishment of a model for scholarly artifact use. A prototype PADL (called Synchrony) providing access to a collection of digitized speeches and their associated textual transcripts is then implemented to demonstrate the viability of the framework. Synchrony allows patrons to search the library for speech and video segments, create annotations/original compositions, integrate these speech segments and annotations/original compositions to form synchronized mixed text and video presentations and, after suitable review, publish these presentations into the digital library if desired. A study to evaluate the PADL concept and the usability of Synchrony was also conducted. The study revealed that participants were able to use Synchrony for the authoring and publishing of presentations and that attitudes toward PADLs were generally positive.