Digital Collections Service Performance Evaluation

For the last few years the research about the statistics and performance evaluation of digital collection has been focused by many international projects. This paper reviews these researches in this field and builds a set of evaluation indicator system of digital collection performance to apply in the practice. Based on this indicator system, the author give a sample to measures and analyses the digital collection performance.Part 1 states the content and utility of digital collection performance evaluation. It is very important to assesses digital collection performance for measuring the usage outcome of digital collection, identifying the status meeting the need of science and technology development, making the collection development and user training policy. The author analyses the influence factors of digital collection performance and the process of evaluating digital collection.Part 2 is the most important section in this paper. Based on the usage statistics element to be accessed in china. The author give seven criterias to be complied with in building the indicator system of evaluating digital collection performance. The performance indicator system includes 14 performance indicators. The description framework about each indicator references ISO11620 , they are objective, scope, definition, method, interpretation and factors affecting the indicator, source and related indicators.Part 3 classifies the evaluation indicators of digital collection performance : quantitative indicator and semiquantitative indicator. After that, the author discusses the obtaining method of each sort of evaluation indicator. There are two obtaining methods about quantitative indicator. the semiquantitative indicator is mainly obtained by survey questionnaire, statistics and analysis.Part 4 applies the indicator system emerged in Part 2 to evaluate and analyses the digital collection performance in Zhengzhou University Library. This work is very important to library managers and librarians to make decisions to use and develop collection.