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Playing a Leadership Role: The Emerging Research Community in Social Studies of DLs

Prepared by Ann Bishop

We have taken a national leadership role in organizing the community of scholars looking at the social impacts of digital libraries, including but not limited to evaluation. This is evidenced by our development and hosting of Allerton Institutes devoted to digital libraries, as well as other activities, some of which are noted below. We feel that these activities are critical for making links between the DLI projects and other research efforts, as well as for developing a research community that will contribute to our understanding of digital library use and users long after the six DLI projects have been completed.

Organizing and Participating in National Forums

Aside from presentations of our work at various conferences and organizations throughout the past year, we have organized and participated in events specifically geared to developing a research community active in social studies of digital libraries:

  • Ann Bishop recommended, and served as the first chair of, the DLI project-wide working group on user issues in digital libraries. Break-out sessions were held at our biennial meetings and communication and collaboration have been maintained among the user evaluation teams of the six DLI projects
  • Bishop led a workshop on user needs at DL 1995 in Austin in June 1995
  • Bishop wrote an article on the research of the six DLI user evaluation teams for the October 1995 issue of D-Lib, an electronic journal for the digital library community
  • S. Leigh Star participated in the NSF-sponsored workshop on Social Aspects of Digital Libraries, held at UCLA in February 1996
  • Bishop assisted in organizing a panel on User Needs Assessment and Digital Libraries and a workshop on User Needs Assessment and Evaluation at ACM's DL 1996 in March 1996. Star will teach in this workshop.
  • Bishop is organizing a session on user evaluation that will be presented at the next DLI project-wide meeting at the University of Michigan in May 1996

    • Allerton Institutes on Digital Libraries

    The 1995 Allerton Institute, called ÒHow We Do User-Centered Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries: A Methodological ForumÓ was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. The idea for the Institute arose from a joint meeting of investigators associated with the six NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative projects currently underway in universities across the country. As chairperson of the Institute, my goal was to bring together an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners involved in the design and study of information systems, in user-centered research in traditional libraries, and in a wide range of digital library projects. The purpose of the Institute was to present both the range of user-centered methods available for studying digital libraries and rationales for choosing amongst them; we also wanted to look ahead to new methods and developments and map out the challenges ahead of us.

    Institute presentations and discussions were devoted to issues such as:

  • What are appropriate measures for gauging digital library outcomes at the individual, group, institutional, and global levels?
  • How can we best incorporate knowledge of user needs and behavior in designing digital library interactions and interfaces?
  • What do we need to know about how people use electronic texts and how can we gain this knowledge and apply it to the development of digital libraries?
  • What can we learn from studies of traditional library use?
  • How can we develop an understanding of the computerization of library work that will help as digital systems are incorporated into current institutional practices?
  • How can we deal with the ethical, practical, and conceptual issues that arise in the remote observation of online (and offline) behavior on a very large scale?
  • How do we foster effective communication among digital library designers, users, and social science researchers?

    • About 60 participants from five different countries submitted a brief, informal discussion document outlining their work and the issues they were most anxious to explore. For the complete set of material associated with the Institute, visit the Allerton web site (http://edfu.lis.uiuc.edu/allerton/95). The discussion documents were used to develop the five major Institute sessions, which focused on co-design approaches, work practice and institutional change, migrating foundational approaches to virtual library environment, electronic information-seeking behavior, and understanding diversity and change. Due to the success of the meeting in fostering the emergence of research community around issues in DL use, participants plan to reconvene at a follow-up Allerton Institute in fall 1996.