Re-designing Greenstone for Seniors

Abstract

The golden generation have a wealth of experience and knowledge from throughout their lifetimes that younger generations wish to retain. In our technology filled world an obvious means of collecting this information is electronically. Digital library col- lections are increasingly used by libraries and large institutions to record their large amounts of information but they can also be used for personal collections. Seniors are often willing and keen to impart their years of experience upon people of the younger generation but time is not always on their side as they grow older. Throughout a lifetime a person could collect large amounts of papers, diaries, pho- tos and media but the time it takes to organise these documents can be long and exhausting and the person's health is not always at its best in old age. Greenstone is a suite of software for creating digital libraries, which are organised collections of documents. Greenstone has the ability to distribute collections either using a server or CD-ROM, and provides advanced searching and organization tools. While Greenstone is a versatile and useful tool in creating digital collections, its in- terface is not designed for senior users. Seniors are commonly perceived to have more physical and mental disadvantages as they get older. These disadvantages can dramatically affect how usable seniors find a piece of software. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how usable the current Greenstone interface is for use by seniors and to re-design the interface so that Greenstone may be more easily used by senior users. This thesis focuses upon what types of documents and descriptive data seniors would like to include in a collection about their life. This is to ascertain exactly what parts of the interface must be improved when it comes to metadata and classifiers. The results of this investigation also helped in the creation of a customised metadata set for senior users use.