HOW MUCH DO WE USE DIGITAL LIBRARIES
Text topic: Digital Media Technologies
Text author: Гордана Стокић Симончић и Жељко Вучковић
This paper seeks to highlight the spectrum of electronic services offered by modern libraries, and the need for the creation of “digital offers” guided by the standards of library efficiency and effectiveness. When we talk about digital libraries, evaluation studies are very rare due to a number of reasons. Usage is just one of the criteria to evaluate digital libraries, and it includes usage patterns, usage statistics, and user studies. The ultimate goal of the evaluation of digital libraries is to determine to what extent and in what manner they affect the processes of learning, education, cultural development, research, preservation of national heritage, collective and personal identity. As the world is still expecting reliable criteria for evaluating the digital library, the positions from which we are waiting make all the difference. In Serbia, an environment that didn’t manage to introduce all the possibilities provided by the Internet, either in terms of e-government, e-commerce, or of e-education, libraries have launched major digitization projects and stepped in front of the needs of our society which is not ready/educated/trained/used to digital resources. The way out of this situation must be sought in strengthening of the information society, of its technical and technological, legal and regulatory assumptions, and also those assumptions related to information literacy of citizens, their awareness of how human knowledge is organized, how to find the right information and how to use it effectively to improve the quality of one’s own life.