Digital library use

Digital libraries can be studied as more than software. This collection approaches them as combined systems of machines, information objects, and the people and habits that surround them, all operating within the wider world of work and community life. Bruce Schatz, who wrote the foreword, argues that a digital library only serves its purpose when its users, its documents, and its underlying system fit together well.

The contributors start with a practical question: how should digital libraries be evaluated so that designers can build better ones? They then move past design concerns to ask what these libraries change in people's lives and social circles, and what they reveal about information, knowledge, and how people think and interact. The chapters draw on both fieldwork and analytical approaches. They look at groups such as community activists, environmental researchers, middle-school students, and the engineers who design these systems, and they examine how each group's relationships with materials and institutions shape the library's effects.

The topics include documents as social objects, the actual limits of a "library without walls," the ecology of digital library environments, usability and evaluation, the relationship between information and institutional change, transparency as a result of social practices meeting information artifacts, and collaborative knowledge building within digital libraries.