What kinds of questions should you address?

Once you begin to reveal important decisions that must be made about a digital library or some subcomponent of it, you can identify the questions that must be addressed to provide the information needed by the decision makers. The clearer and more detailed your evaluation questions are, the more likely that you will be able to provide reliable and valid information to your decision makers.

Suppose your evaluation is focused on decisions about the types of services that your digital library should include. Some of the questions that might be addressed are:

• What services are offered by other digital libraries?
• What services have patrons of your digital library requested?
• What services would your patrons be willing to pay for?
• What services would require external funding?

Obviously, this is only a partial list of the questions that might be addressed within an evaluation focused on decisions about services. One challenge in evaluation plan ning is limiting the questions to those that are the most relevant to the decisions that must be made without exceeding the time, money, and other resources allocated for evaluation. In most cases, there will be far more questions that could be asked in evaluating a digital library, or its subcomponents, than your resources will allow, and therefore some difficult choices must be made about which questions will actually be addressed. You should make these choices in collaboration with your stakeholders well in advance of any evaluation data collection activities.