Digital library use : social practice in design and evaluation / edited by Ann Peterson Bishop, Nancy A. Van House, and Barbara P. Buttenfield.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bishop, Ann P.

Van House, Nancy A.

Buttenfield, Barbara Pfeil.

Series:

Digital libraries and electronic publishing.

Digital libraries and electronic publishing

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Digital libraries--Social aspects.

Digital libraries.

Digital libraries--Planning.

Information technology--Social aspects.

Information technology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (354 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The contributors to this volume view digital libraries (DLs) from a social as well as technological perspective. They see DLs as sociotechnical systems, networks of technology, information artifacts, and people and practices interacting with the larger world of work and society. As Bruce Schatz observes in his foreword, for a digital library to be useful, the users, the documents, and the information system must be in harmony. The contributors begin by asking how we evaluate DLs -- how we can understand them in order to build better DLs -- but they move beyond these basic concerns to explore how DLs make a difference in people's lives and their social worlds, and what studying DLs might tell us about information, knowledge, and social and cognitive processes. The chapters, using both empirical and analytical methods, examine the social impact of DLs and also the web of social and material relations in which DLs are embedded; these far-ranging social worlds include such disparate groups as community activists, environmental researchers, middle-school children, and computer system designers. Topics considered include documents and society; the real boundaries of a "library without walls"; the ecologies of digital libraries; usability and evaluation; information and institutional change; transparency as a product of the convergence of social practices and information artifacts; and collaborative knowledge construction in digital libraries.

Contents:

Contents; Foreword; 1 Introduction: Digital Libraries as Sociotechnical Systems; Part I; 2 Documents and Libraries: A Sociotechnical Perspective; 3 Finding the Boundaries of the Library without Walls; 4 An Ecological Perspective on Digital Libraries; Part II; 5 Designing Digital Libraries for Usability; 6 The People in Digital Libraries: Multifaceted Approaches to Assessing Needs and Impact; 7 Participatory Action Research and Digital Libraries: Reframing Evaluation; 8 Colliding with the Real World: Heresies and Unexplored Questions about Audience, Economics, and Control of Digital Libraries

Part III9 Information and Institutional Change: The Case of Digital Libraries; 10 Transparency beyond the Individual Level of Scale: Convergence between Information Artifacts and Communities of Practice; 11 Digital Libraries and Collaborative Knowledge Construction; 12 The Flora of North America Project: Making the Case [Study] for Social Realist Theory; List of Contributors; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Made available online by Ebrary.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-282-09610-9

9786612096105

0-262-25574-X

1-4237-2535-2

OCLC:

61678600