The Interaction of Community and Individual Practices in the Design of a Digital Library
Christine L. Borgman · 2006
For a single digital library to serve multiple communities, design must be based on an under-standing of practices in each of the communities and of relationships between those practices. This paper draws upon data from two large, collaborative re-search projects, the Alexandria Digital Earth Proto-type (ADEPT) and the Center for Embedded Net-worked Sensing (CENS). Our findings suggest that users ’ roles, and the degree to which those roles are based on individual or community interests, is an important determinant of how and whether they will use a digital library. In turn, the effect of users ’ roles varies by the type of content in the digital library (i.e., primary vs. secondary sources) and by the user’s level of expertise in the knowledge domain. Despite these complicating factors, digital libraries have the potential to align the activities of scientists and students by providing context for the scientific process and by representing data in ways that are useful for multiple purposes.