The on-going evaluation of the testbed by users will be of major importance to the project's success. This entails two segments: gathering user input, first at UCSB and later from selected installations in other libraries; and actively seeking additional funds, from organizations such as NSF and NASA, to perform this critical task. Early in the project, organizations (e.g., public, academic, and special libraries associations; AAUP) will be alerted about Alexandria's objective, followed by hands-on exposure of selected representatives from these groups for interface, performance and system tools evaluation, and passing users' critical comments to the Alexandria design team for later versions. From this process a robust and functional set of user tools and interfaces will be developed, system performance improved, and the seeds of Alexandria's acceptance sown in a diverse user community.
Upon the completion of a sound beta version of the system, the Executive Committee will solicit proposals from the library community for participation in the formal testing of Alexandria. Sites will be selected based on criteria as developed by organizations such as ARL, but should include sites serving a variety types of clients, with important unique collections, and occupying a position of leadership in the information community. Each site will be expected to provide its own hardware and personnel, and agree to seek from the broadest user communities input on interface design, manipulation/visualization tools and system performance. Each will perform the full scope of library activities using the system (e.g., data input, metadata construction, query, data and metadata retrieval and local visualization). These tests will be performed in concert with the design team through frequent, systematic reporting mechanisms.