Information and Institutional Change: The Case of Digital Libraries
Philip E. Agre · The MIT Press eBooks · 2003
Is a digital library a machine or an institution? The term has been used both ways (Borgman 1999). Computer scientists are willing to build a database and simply call it a library. But whatever they are called, society will evaluate digital libraries in terms of the ways that they fit, or fail to fit, into the institutional world around them (Kling and Elliott 1994). Institutions, for present purposes, are the enduring categories of society: social roles, legal systems, linguistic forms, technical standards, and all of the other components of the playing field upon which human relationships are conducted (Commons 1924, Goodin 1996, March and Olsen 1989, North 1990, Powell and DiMaggio 1991). An institutional field is a particular relatively enduring ensemble of institutional categories; examples include particular historical forms of the market, the political system, or the university.