Development of a User-Friendly Digital Library Resource Discovery Tool to Mitigate Learners’ Technical Hitches

This chapter aims to improve the library Resource Discovery Tool (RDT) as a library catalog extension of the third generation that allows one search box to see through various databases and repositories. Although RDT’s interaction is considered positive for library users, issues of usability and accessibility related to user desires, needs, and preferences continue to be a problem. This chapter describes the technological methods, standards, and protocols required, and then establishes RDT concerning the obstacles encountered. The problems were classified into three categories; operation issues, visual interface, and level of navigation. An alternative approach, supported by these categories to strengthen the usability and functionality of RDTs was an adaptation. For every specific category of problem, the description was handled with the objective of this chapter to alleviate RDT usability and accessibility by indexing a variety of digital information resources beyond the library collections. The developed RDT holds an index that represents the full-text content that may be searched, and also offers a linking facility to open the full-text content.