Before you begin a digital project there are a series of questions you should ask. Usually, questions regarding users and marketing are glossed over, but they important and, in my experience, too little effort is spent on them.

Who Are Your Users?

A catchall as to whom will benefit from a digital collection is: scholars, teachers, and students. This one sentence response may be for an internal project proposal or just a simple justification; however, it’s useless. Are you building a collection just to build it, because it interests you? Or, are you building a collection to create a resource for a specific group of people? How does a college student interact with online information versus an elementary school student? What might a faculty member at a research institution find useful versus a professor at a community college?

HTML and CSS are easy. If you’re taking the time to create a digital collection, why create one interface? The backend is the most complicated. Why not have interfaces designed for your different user groups, instead of one interface that may now leave some of your users clicking elsewhere? Are libraries adopting the use of stories from scrum? If not, why not?
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