Organizational usability of digital libraries: Case study of legal research in civil and criminal courts

Digital Libraries (DLs) is a recent term used to refer to Information systems (IS) and services that provide electronic documents—text files, digital sound, digital video—available in dynamic or archival repositories. Some insist that DLs refer to documentary collections that are accessed via the Internet, while others refer to DLs as any collection of electronic text, sound, or video files used in a shared space. There is much at stake in these debates. If DLs are narrowly defined, then we lose the ability to learn about key DL issues from previous research, theory, and professional practice in IS and librarianship. We present a case study of the use of legal research DLs (LRDLs) in the California Civil and Criminal Courts. We extend the concept of organization validity (Markus & Robey, 1983) in IS to that of organizational usability in LRDLs. The results suggest that points of access to LRDLs influence usage, that there is a strong interplay between home computer use and LRDL use at work, and that legal professionals prefer one-on-one assistance rather than group training. Conditions fostering organizationally unusable systems are presented based on empirical data. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.