Overview

The invention and innovation of the Internet over the past 25 years has led to the digitalisation of publishing and a large increase in the amount of online content. As a result, there is an ever-increasing need to manage this vast quantity of electronic data. Digital libraries provided a method to address this need by allowing materials to be stored in an electronic format and allowing users to manipulate extensive collections of data. There are now many digital libraries in existence, with several focusing solely on storing academic content. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) , which is the focus of this project, is an example of such a digital library. Although Digital Libraries provided a solution to store the ever-increasing online content, their lack of sufficient user-centred features makes finding relevant information difficult.

Most digital libraries have extensive resources but often lack sufficient user services to engage with them effectively and efficiently. There is a growing demand for such services. The goal of this project was to meet the needs of NDLTD users by providing a set of enhanced user services, which are detailed below. The features aimed to enable researchers to access useful and relevant information more efficiently than the current academic search engines available and to expose users to more resources than they would be with a simple search. To accomplish this, this project explored two different ways of engaging with content: user-organised content and visually organised content.