Investigating User Interfaces of Non-Iranian Digital Libraries based on Social Bookmarking Capabilities and Characteristics to Use by Iranian Digital Libraries

Abstract

Current study aims to investigate the status of user interfaces of non-Iranian digital libraries’ based on social bookmarking capabilities and characteristics to use by Iranian digital libraries. This research studies the characteristics and capabilities of top digital libraries’ user interfaces in the world based on social bookmarking used by library users. This capability facilitates producing, identifying, organizing, and sharing contents using tags. Survey method was used with descriptive-analytical approach in this study. Populations include non-Iranian digital libraries interfaces. Top ten digital libraries’ interfaces were selected as the sample. A researcher-made checklist prepared based on literature review and investigating four distinguished websites (Library Thing, Delicious, Amazon, and Google Book). Faced validity evaluated by 10 experts’ viewpoints, then reliability calculated 0.87.Findings of this study are important because of two reasons: first, it provides a comprehensive and an unambiguous vision for recognizing user interfaces’ basic capabilities and characteristics based on social bookmarking. Second, it can provide a base for designing digital libraries in Iran. The results showed that the majority of digital libraries around the world had not used web 2.0 characteristics such as producing, identifying, organizing, and sharing contents except two digital libraries (Google Books, and Ibiblio).

Keywords

• Digital Library 2.0
• Social digital library
• Social bookmarking
• Social tagging
• Folksonomies