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1. Introduction
In the development of digital technologies, digital resources have become more popular and important to university teachers and students who are the library users. However, most of the users may think that a digital library is just a shortcut to accessing online databases, only a few of them would like to use the services and information in digital library. In the face of competition from commercial search engines, digital libraries should take some action to engage the users' attention. In the internet world, the most popular may not be the best. For example Microsoft Windows is the most popular and widely used operating system, however its reputation is far below Mac OS of Apple Inc. In this project, a merit system has been developed and implemented to increase the user viscosity with the digital library of a university. The main aim of the project was to fascinate the user to lifetime digital library use.
The concept of user viscosity comes from the Social Networking Service (SNS); it is an important idea of internet marketing and web site ranking ([12] Wang and Wang, 2010). The principle of SNS to realize is that one person as the center and forms a relationship network through a series of tools ([6] Library 2.0 Studio, 2008). The most important theoretical base of SNS is Six Degrees of Separation, which refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer ([15] Yand et al. , 2010). According to this theoretical base, every single person can expand his/her social network through "a friend to friend" way and later this single social network could form a huge social network. At present, the SNS web site help people to expand their social relationship and maintain relations based on "common interests" ([5] Li, 2009).
The "viscosity" can significantly reduce marketing cost, because the cost for maintaining a current user is far less than acquiring a new user. This concept is mainly applied to the commercial field and web site services ([11] Toshihiko, 2010). Similar concepts are web site...