<正>Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,2006,Volume 57, Issue 12, p. 1629-1643 The Open Video Digital Library (OVDL) provides digital video files to the education and research community and is distinguished by an innovative user interface that offers multiple kinds of visual surrogates to people searching for video content. The OVDL is used by several thousand people around the world each month and part of this success is due to its user interface. This article examines the interplay between research and practice in the development of this particular digital library with an eye toward lessons for all digital