Digital Library Use

Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation, edited by Ann Peterson Bishop, Nancy A. Van House and Barbara P. Buttenfield. MIT Press, 2003

This is the fifth volume in the series on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing from MIT Press. It contains a number of essays which focus on the social and epistemological issues surrounding the topic, as well as a number of case studies, with the avowed aim of challenging readers to broaden their understanding. A quick recording of the chapters may demonstrate this. Levy opens with an analysis of what constitutes a document; Marshall looks at boundary conditions both unintended and interpreted; O’Day and Nardi use an ecological metaphor to highlight linkages and dependencies; Borgman uses case studies in subject groups to consider usability and utility issues; Marchionini covers needs assessment for prototype design; Bishop presents a case study of the Afya health education project for African American women; Lynch is thought provoking on governance and sustainability; Agre looks at how libraries fit their communities and how such communities “can conduct [their] collective cognition with a reasonable degree of autonomy.”; Star is concerned with the design of digital libraries and how they scale up, finding that with increasing scale, transparency “becomes more subject to contention arising from the heterogeneity of the participating social worlds.”; Van House applies social theory to the social processes of knowledge work and the challenges which the digital library poses there; Spasser proposes the use of socialist realist theory in evaluation. It should be clear from this that the book has a stellar cast of contributors, some well known in the UK such as Philip Agre, Christine Borgman and Cliff Lynch. It has to be said that the book does offer a real challenge. It is unremittingly a hard and serious work ranging widely from Socratic Discourse to Saussure and socialist realist evaluation models. The writing tends to be both dense and rich reflecting the avowedly theoretical approach sought by the editors. The writing also has a tendency to descend into painful neologisms such as “foregrounding” in preference to a richer if more traditional use of language. And several of the chapters have multiple authors, which can lend a somewhat lumpen committee tone to the writing.

It is interesting and perhaps disappointing to see how little of the UK experience is alluded to. Despite fifteen years of JISC involvement in digital libraries and content the scattered British references tend to be to the work often funded in the distant past by BLRDD by such figures as Alina Vickery and Jack Meadows. Although the JISC programmes have always leaned towards a pragmatic approach rather than a theoretical one it is interesting, for example, to see the absence of UK citations in the chapter which proposes an ecological metaphor for digital libraries, something worked on separately in the UK by Dempsey and others and the theme of the 1999 Bath Conference on Networking and the Future of Libraries.

So all in all this is an excellent if difficult work, with much of interest but with a significant but probably unintentional national view of a global phenomenon. It undoubtedly meets its goal of offering challenges and broadening understanding while promoting reflection. It is certainly not an instruction manual or primer. But it will repay the investment of the time and effort required to get to the end.