Ann Peterson Bishop

Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois
218 LIS Building
501 East Daniel Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Phone: (217) 244-3299
Fax: (217) 244-3302
E-mail: abishop@uiuc.edu
Research Topic Area: social informatics
Keyword: digital libraries


Grant Title

Libraries, People, and Change:
A Research Forum on Digital Libraries

The 38th Allerton Institute, called "Libraries, People, and Change: A Research Forum on Digital Libraries," was held on October 27-29, 1996 at the Allerton Park and Conference Center in Monticello, Illinois. The Institute was sponsored by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and supported by a grant from NSF. The Institute attracted 59 registered participants who represented digital library researchers from government, academia, and industry, along with developers and managers of digital library projects in a broad spectrum of application areas. The aim of the meeting was to provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussing human-centered approaches to digital library (DL) design and analysis. Institute sessions were devoted to organizing information in DLs, supporting DL users, and DL management issues.

Workshops were held on the Sense-Making approach for investigating DL needs and use, developing DL evaluation programs, and studying the use of digital documents. In addition, participants produced descriptions of their own professional development as part of an informal investigation into the interdisciplinary nature of DL social science research and conducted breakout sessions on a variety of technical topics and social issues. Participants felt that the Institute helped strengthen the community of researchers focused on DL design and evaluation and provided a productive and unique forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences among researchers and practitioners. Participants also began organizing conference sessions, research proposals, and other initiatives to carry forward with social science DL research activities.

At the Allerton Institute, we introduced and discussed emerging theoretical bases for studying DL design and use. In proposing the application of the Sense-Making approach to DL studies, Brenda Dervin argued for a theory of the subject that "conceptualized the individual as: centered and decentered; ordered and chaotic; cognitive, physical, spiritual, and emotional; and differing potentially across time and across space." She noted further, however, that

while Sense-Making focuses on the human individual, it does not rest on an individualistic theory of human action. Rather, it assumes that structure, culture, community, organization are created, maintained, reified, challenged, changed, resisted, and destroyed IN COMMUNICATION and can only be understood by focusing on the individual-in-context, including social context. Note, however, that this is not the same as saying the only way to look at the individual is through the lens of social context because this kind of theorizing implies the individual is entirely constrained or defined by that social context.
Andrew Dillon discussed his attempts to extend traditional cognitive approaches to investigating how people read documents to include social dynamics, or what he calls "socio-cognitive" systems design. In this approach, researchers seek to understand the processes that shape behavior at the interface in both the short and long term. One example of socio-cognitive research described by Dillon was the study of the "relationship between cultural rules of discourse emergent in a community of speakers or writers/readers, and the perception of order in electronically presented documents - the emergence of genres." Study results demonstrated that long term effects of training and shared expectations lead people to significantly outperform non-members in certain information-seeking tasks.

Robert Sandusky proposed the application of a distributed system management framework to DLs in which fault, configuration, security, accounting, and performance management are addressed. Highlighting the importance of a human-centered approach to DL management, Sandusky advocated looking at how librarians, computer engineers and users are all involved in developing DL collections, services, institutions, and technologies.

Participants also discussed emerging methods for studying DL design and use from a human-centered perspective. Michael Nilan articulated a process--based on users' articulation of their needs and the ability for them to provide online comments via the DL-- for establishing a communications environment among system designers and users in order to refine initial design requirements and modify the system as changes in user needs are articulated. Robert Downs described his work with DL transaction logs, in which log reports support interviews with users by providing cues to the interviewer for directing the interview, by stimulating respondents' recollections of their online behavior, and by providing a reference for discussing and reflecting on this behavior. S. Leigh Star raised the possibility of cross- fertilization between grounded theory and the construction of faceted classification in analyzing behaviors and structures inherent in DLs.

The role of people in DLs was highlighted throughout the Allerton Institute. In the session on user support, Michael Twidale presented his research on the nature of collaboration in DL use, citing his key findings that people often learn from friends and do not use system documentation. He also described the range of human characteristics evident in mental models of search engines, which includes a smart and rational person who goes and gets what you want, a mischievous and inconsistent genie, and a criminal to be interrogated. In considering human factors in DL indexing and access, Marcia Bates discussed the manner in which the experiences of information seekers and indexers are phenomenologically different, and the implications of these differences for system design.

Political issues in DL design and evaluation also received attention throughout the Institute. Participants discussed the potential political manipulation of user-centered design techniques. Doctoral students raised political issues that directly affect their development as DL researchers. They talked about the dangers inherent in their choice of DLs as a primary area of study, noting that state of the art technologies are not employed in most libraries, that true interdisciplinary endeavors are seldom accepted fully in the academy, and that DLs can occupy Ran ugly middle grounds between theory and practice.

The 1996 Allerton Institute was the second in a series. Part of the original impetus for convening an interdisciplinary forum on human-centered DL design and evaluation came from the desire to share and build upon the experiences of those individuals, like myself, who are currently involved in social science research associated with the six NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative (DLI) projects. Our DLI Social Science Team has conducted focus groups on how academics identify and use journal articles, observations and interviews related to the flow of information in academic environments, an ethnographic study of how people organize their workspace, and usability tests of our DLI prototypes for a testbed of fulltext engineering journals in SGML format. We are also analyzing testbed usage through the integrated analysis of user registration forms with transaction logs and plan on implementing targeted online user surveys and feedback mechanisms. Focal points for our investigation are the use of individual components of journal articles and the manner in which formal and folk classifications merge in attempts by individuals to navigate the vocabulary space of DLs.

References

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