The quality of documentary resources on the web: from content to service

Abstract

The growing and diversified supply of online content by libraries, documentation centers and archives opens up new issues for the quality control both of the development process and the service providing. The emphasis has been placed by the LIS community above all on the nature and characters of the offered resources, their coverage, format and license of access and use, while the problems related to the actual experience of use and re-use by end users were often underestimated. The purpose of this contribution is to underline the cruciality of user-centered digital environment design based on quality models and standards, involving users throughout the project lifecycle. The proposed perspective would facilitate the LIS community to fully meet the ever-new challenges posed by the digital documentary universe, not undergoing its evolutionary dynamics but contributing to this evolution, thanks to the adoption of a shared reference model for the design, management and evaluation of the quality of the documentary environments on the web.