Abstract
The University of North Texas Libraries’ Digital Collections are situated as a unified whole within their preservation infrastructure, with three separate user interfaces serving the content to different audiences. These separate interfaces are: The UNT Digital Library (DL), The Portal to Texas History, and The Gateway to Oklahoma History. Situated within each interface are collections, and hosted within these collections are digital objects. One collection, the UNT Scholarly Works Repository, specifically serves UNT’s research and creative contributions and functions as the Institutional repository (IR) for the University of North Texas. Because UNT Scholarly works is seated as a collection amongst other collections, users can access faculty research, not just out of an interest in research from specific faculty members, but also as it ties into the user’s broader understanding of a given topic. With flexible infrastructure and metadata schema that connect collections beneath the umbrella of the wider preservation infrastructure, the UNT DL employs full-text searching and interlinked metadata to strengthen and make visible the connections between objects in different collections. This paper examined how users navigated between other collections within the UNT IR, as well as within the UNT DL. Through this examination, we observed patterns between how users navigated between objects, understood which collections may have related to one another, examined why some unique items were used more than others, and viewed the average number of items used within a session.
Highlights
This paper examined how users navigated between other collections within the UNT Institutional repository (IR), as well as within the UNT Digital Library (DL)
At the 2017 National Digital Newspaper Program meeting, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress, a recurring conversation concerned how users interacted with digital collections
Hügi, and Schneider examined the impact of faceted navigation on users, in direct, full, usability studies [4]. Their findings about the usefulness and recommendations about how to tailor facets informed how we examined our own log data to understand user interactions across collections because user interactions at the UNT Digital Library are heavily influenced by the faceted navigation built into the interface
Summary
At the 2017 National Digital Newspaper Program meeting, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress, a recurring conversation concerned how users interacted with digital collections. Attendees expressed interest in observing how a user’s individual usage session with a digital collection might include interactions with different types of digital objects, with distinct collections tied together through facets, or with objects from entirely different subject matters. This discussion resulted in a communal acceptance that enabling access to dissimilar but related (through metadata) object types was positive for the user experience. The Portal to Texas History, and The Gateway to Oklahoma History Each of these interfaces contains a number of collections holding digital objects. Arranging metadata facets enables users to create a constellation of digital objects across diverse resource types and collections, Publications 2019, 7, 42; doi:10.3390/publications7020042 www.mdpi.com/journal/publications
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