Bonolo: A General Digital Library System for File-Based Collections

There is an ever-increasing amount of digital content being generated that needs to be well-organised, preserved and made accessible. The majority of generic repository software tools that currently exist are, arguably, overly complex, thus making collections difficult to manage and maintain in resource constrained environments. A possible solution to this problem would, in part, require designing digital library tools and services that are simple and easy to manage. This paper describes a digital library system that is based on a set of design decisions aimed at simplifying repository software architectures. The proposed system makes use of a hierarchical file-store for storage of digital objects. Evaluation of the system by means of a user experience study was conducted to investigate the usefulness of the system, its relative ease of use and what effect, if any, the architecture would have on the user experience. Experimental results showed that users found the system useful, effective and easy to use and that the architecture did not appear to negatively influence the user experience.