The first ADL Design Review (ADR) was held in Leesburg, Viriginia, September 7-8, 1995. The meeting was targeted at members of the federal library and archiving. The first Alexandria Design Review was held 7-8 September 1995, in Leesburg Virginia, and targeted members of the federal library community, including reference, depository, and data producing agencies.
The meeting was attended by roughly 70 participants, and proceeded by alternating small group discussions with summarizations given to the full group. At the time of the first meeting, ADL had not been ported fully from the Rapid Prototype onto the Web testbed, and functionality was incomplete. The meeting focus remained squarely in the three areas of user requirements.
A first area was Technical Issues and Impediments. Each small group was presented with the same set of questions: What difficulties does your organization face applying digital technology to support collections of spatially indexed information? What implementations are underway to address them? What mechanisms are in place to evaluate effectiveness/performance of current procedures?
A second area was Services and the Client/Patron View. There are technical components and user components to this topic. Discussions emphasized requirements for the Catalog, content of ADL collections, and standards and metadata issues. Questions presented to small groups included the following: What is the current range of services most often asked for by clients/patrons/users? How many of these are currently delivered? What current mechanisms are in place for evaluating client satisfaction? Which services could be automated? Once automated, which might incur a loss of client satisfaction?
The third area was Policy and Vision. This was run with the full group as a whole, with great success. Questions for discussion included: What should be the priorities for digital library development? What are current resources available for implementation? How are they prioritized? What should ADL priorities be? Where would participants like to see digital library technology in one, five, and ten years?
The group was charged with continuing active participation in reviewing ADL. At that stage in system implementation, ADL did not have ready mechanisms to facilitate large volume external involvement. Since then, we have implemented online surveys, beta testing of the Web version, and other means for electronic feedback. We have developed a large group of beta testers, and developed a second Design Review Panel accordingly.