Research Topics for Social Aspects of Digital Libraries

As libraries lose their walls and expand their reach into their patrons' workplaces and communities, the research agenda beneath the rubric of "information needs" will have to expand accordingly. When patrons search for information within the walls of a library, they have already detached themselves to a significant degree from the concrete sites within which their needs for information arose. In this context it makes some sense to think of their "need" as a cognitive object that they are carrying with them to the reference desk or the catalog. But as library patrons do more of their information-seeking in the same places that they conduct the rest of their activities, it becomes necessary to conceptualize the "need" -- its rise, its unfolding, and its resolution -- as something woven into a larger fabric of life. How is information part of life? How are needs for information part of life? And how is the activity of seeking information part of life? To ask these questions well, we need powerful concepts to analyze both the forms of information and the forms of life. Accordingly, the questions may be usefully approached within the framework of the following three challenges for empirical research and theorization:

1. How are the forms of information -- specifically, the genres of documents (novel, road map, stock table, academic journal article, etc) and the media (book, video, Web page, etc) within which the documents are realized -- adapted to the activities within which they are used?
2. How are individuals initiated into the specific forms of activity (doing physics problem sets, writing speeches, editing collected works, etc) within which particular forms of information are used?
3. How are individuals' experiences of themselves (as "not knowing", "needing help", "looking for information", "intimidated", "empowered", etc) part of the network of social relationships (teacher-student, librarian-patron, supervisor-employee, state-citizen, etc) within which their activities are conducted?

1. Adapting information systems to particular activities by providing several different "appearances" to the same underlying information, as well as by building information-search and -retrieval tools that are adapted to the forms of particular genres that patrons use routinely in their culturally or institutionally organized activities.
2. Building communication tools that permit information professionals to become integral members of the cooperative relationships through which individuals engage in typified forms of activity -- and, just as importantly, the processes through which they become socialized or acculturated into those forms of activity.
3. Providing support tools, cultural values, and training for communities of information users to network amongst themselves and organize for mutual assistance and political participation around the skills and politics of information usage.