Research On The Users' Based Evaluation Index System For The Digital Archives

The construction of digital archives has been carried out in full swing all over the country in recent years, because of the vigorous promotion of archives informatization. The contents involve almost every aspect of the digital archives with endless research results, but have less in evaluation index system.The digital archives exist for the users. The service quality should be evaluated by users. It should emphasise on the users whatever the evaluation system and method. The paper attempts to discuss the evaluation scope of digital archives from the users' perspective based on basic archive theory, as well as the users' resource demand characteristics and information seeking behaviors in their search of archival information. There are four parts of this paper:Part one: This part concludes the research of the evaluation index system of digital archives, and indicates the defects by analyzing the construction of it.Part two: This part discusses the relationship between the information demand behavior and the evaluation index system of digital archives, which supports the design of the evaluation system with the analysis on the characteristics and influence affects of it. Part three: The establishment of digital archives evaluation system and quantified model from the users'perspective are involved in this part. Based on the theory of archival information demands and seeking behaviors, the author designed an evaluation index system of third tier,which was made up of archival information resource, retrieval function, service construction and supporting condition. These indexes are quantified by questionnaire and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods to construct a quantified evaluation model. Afterwards, two well-known digital archives accessible are chosen for empirical study to verify the applicability of the model.Part four: Some recommendations are put forward to promote the satisfaction from several aspects based on the above research results, hoping that it will benefit to the understanding of users' demands, the establishment and development of digital archives, as well as further improvement of satisfaction from users.