Usability Evaluation of E-Dunhuang Cultural Heritage Digital Library

Abstract

Digital libraries have been strategic in preserving and making non-movable cultural heritage information accessible to everyone with network connections. In light of their cultural and historical importance in the ancient “Silk Road,” murals and stone caves in Dunhuang, a remote city in northwest China,have been digitized, and the first batch of digitized visual materials has been made available to the general public through the e-Dunhuang digital library since May 2016. The aim of this study was to systematically evaluate e-Dunhuang from users’ perspectives, through usability testing with nine user tasks in different complexity levels and in-depth interviews with regard to a set of criteria in user experience. The results of quantitative analysis confirmed the overall effectiveness of e-Dunhuang in supporting user task completion and demonstrated significant improvements in several criteria over an earlier panorama collection of Dunhuang caves. The results of qualitative analysis revealed in-depth reasons for why participants felt satisfied with some criteria but had concerns with other criteria. Based on the findings, suggestions are proposed for further improvement in e-Dunhuang. As e-Dunhuang is a representative repository of digitized visual materials of cultural heritage, this study offers insights and empirical findings on user-centered evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries.