Designing a Music Digital Library: Discovering What People Really Want

Abstract

This chapter describes a set of techniques that have been successfully employed in eliciting user needs for a music digital library. Our focus has been on discovering the types of music information that users would hope to find in a music digital library, the browsing and searching strategies that users “natively” employ, the attributes that are used to describe music information needs, and the purpose for which the music information is sought. We concentrate on studying authentic music information needs—that is, we analyze the information seeking behavior of real people engaged in attempting to satisfy real music-related questions, outside of a lab. Once a rich understanding is reached of what people really want, then the lessons learned can be applied to designing the contents, interface, and search interactions for a music digital library.