Digital libraries collections and services: evaluation criteria

Abstract

Literature review of the main evaluation criteria for digital library collections and services. It is sustained that digital library collections and services can be evaluated from different levels, hence the best criteria were selected, based upon the seven evaluation levels proposed by Tefko Saracevic: social, institutional, individual, interface, engineering, processing, and content. Among the final considerations, we found out that the existence of different types of criteria conditions the way in which to evaluate the digital library collections and services. Also, it could be said that these kind of libraries are entities containing a great quantity of elements, which could be susceptible of evaluation and, despite there are not many documents treating the evaluation of this kind of information units, some exist which do focus on creating some evaluation criteria; criteria which in some cases has been obtained from the research made in traditional libraries