Transitioning from the ecological fieldwork to an online repository: a digital library solution and evaluation

This article presents a digital library solution for integrating data from a network of ecological sites using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and the Open Digital Library (ODL) framework extended with geographic components. This solution incorporates simple, yet effective, decentralized input interfaces for handling heterogeneous data from unstructured sources. In this article, we focus on the architectural aspects of this solution and on an experimental evaluation, conducted with real users, of the proposed data input interface in terms of usability and data quality.