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

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : digital libraries as sociotechnical systems / Nancy A. Van House, Ann Peterson Bishop, and Barbara P. Buttenfield -- Documents and libraries : a sociotechnical perspective / David M. Levy -- Finding the boundaries of the library without walls / Catherine C. Marshall -- Ecological perspective on digital libraries / Vicki L. O'Day and Bonnie A. Nardi -- Designing digital libraries for usability / Christine L. Borgman -- People in digital libraries : multifaceted approaches to assessing needs and impact / Gary Marchionini, Catherine Plaisant, and Anita Komlodi -- Participatory action research and digital libraries : reframing evaluation / Ann Peterson Bishop [and others] -- Colliding with the real world : heresies and unexplored questions about audience, economics, and control of digital libraries / Clifford Lynch -- Information and institutional change : the case of digital libraries / Philip E. Agre.

Transparency beyond the individual level of scale : convergence between information artifacts and communities of practice / Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Laura J. Neumann -- Digital libraries and collaborative knowledge construction / Nancy A. Van House -- Flora of North America project : making the case [study] for social realist theory / Mark A. Spasser.

Print version record.

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.

OCLC WorldCat Holdings

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