"Real information needs" are culturally constituted For example, few Orthodox Jews treat the New Testament as a source of "information," and many view it as a source of blasphemy and deception. In contrast, many fundamentalist Christians cherish specific versions of the New Testament and treat its contents as a source of sacred truths. The benign but epistemoligically flat term "information" hardly helps us understand the how specific groups may trust specific materials, while treating others as sources of speculation, opinion, propaganda and so on. Even in this world of culturally constructed epistemological variability, epistemological purity is not necessarily a driver of value. People value opinion, thus the market for pundits' reviews of all kinds, from films through restaurants, at the expense of "merely factual" accounts. And, people may value epistemologically tainted materials, as when a historian searches for specific propaganda produced by or produced to influence a group that she studies.
"The social context of DLs" can be conceived of as a kind of diffuse social vapor that hovers around DLs and the men, women, and children who may use them. In this view, all artifacts, including DLs, are situated in a social world that is populated by people, groups, organizations, and influenced by their social relationships.
This view is not "wrong;" but I believe that we must go farther to understand the actual and possible roles of specific DLs within socially constituted communication systems. By analogy -- it is a mistake to view urban road systems simply as a context for cars. Analysts who are interested in improving the ability of people to travel hither and thither focus as much upon the design of multi- modal transportation systems that can support trucks, cars, bikes, walking, train connections, etc. Cars are just one means of transportation, albeit commonplace in urban centers, and dominant in post-suburban metro areas such as Los Angeles.
By analogy to transportation systems, we should be able to understand the communication systems that people rely upon. (Phil Agre [1995] suggests the vivid metaphor "institutional circuits".) The special case of refereed electronic scholarly journals is instructive. Despite high enthusiasm by advocates, few electronic journals are now viewed as strong scholarly publications (Kling and Covi, 1995). Electronic journals might help improve scholarly communication; but there are important institutional architectural questions about making them part of the scholarly corpus through cataloguing, abstracting, archiving, etc. that have yet to be systematically resolved. The example of scholarly electronic journals also illustrates the role of social systems in rewarding (or penalizing) people when they contribute to specific corpuses. The best DL of electronic journals in field X won't improve scholarly communication much, unless good scholars view them as important sources of high quality cutting edge scholarship.
Challenge #2. Understand how to shape communication systems that include multiple media (paper, tape, firm, and digital) so that they effectively improve specific kinds of social communication within specific groups/communities.
In analogy to our focus here on DLs, it is possible to organize conferences, research, policies, and transportation systems to improve the effective utilization of cars. Such a focus could be terrific for the automobile and related industries, but not necessarily good for city residents or visitors. There is a small literature by urban analysts and planners about the ways that highway design undermined the social life of cities (Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City; Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities. ). A focus on improving transportation (or in our case, social communication) would be much more constructive. How can/do specific DLs alter/open/close/restructure communications within specific groups - whether it is scholars tracking a specific field, teachers searching for course materials, market researchers tracking firms that offer competing products, kids in search of a new hot (musical) band, or men and women wondering which film they might see next weekend?
One key feature of the discourse about DLs is the assumption that men, women and children who wish to use them have ready access. Car-dependence and weak public transit or walkable distracts in post-suburban regions like Southern California disempowers people who cannot drive (because of legal age barriers or infirmity), In a similar way, the socio-technical communication systems that link authors and readers might break down for those who are not well connected (by dint of financial resources, local computing infrastructure, reduction in local public access centers [aka libraries]), etc.
Opportunity #1: The issues identified above can be effectively studied by examining how and why specific groups use DLs and other communication media.
There are major opportunities to study these issues based on the services offered through the on-line services (AoL, Prodigy, Compuserve), WWW, professional services (Dialog), full text data bases, and abstracting services.
Agre, Phil. (in press). "Institutional Circuitry: Thinking About the Forms and Uses of Information" Information Technology and Libraries.
Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. [New York] Random House.
Kling, Rob. 1980. "Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives in Recent Empirical Research." Computing Surveys. 12(1):61-110.
Kling, Rob. 1996. "Synergies and Competition Between Life in Cyberspace and Face-to-face Communities." Social Science Computer Review. 14(1)(Spring):50-54.
Kling, Rob. in press. "Boutique and Mass Media Markets, Intermediation, and the Costs of On-Line Services." The Communication Review.
Kling, Rob and Lisa Covi. 1995. "Electronic Journals and Legitimate Media in the Systems of Scholarly Communication." The Information Society. 11(4)
Kling, Rob and Tom Jewett. 1994. "The Social Design of Worklife With Computers and Networks: An Open Natural Systems Perspective." in Advances in Computers. Volume 39. Marshall C. Yovits (ed.) San Diego: Academic Press.
Kling, Rob, Olin, Spencer, & Poster, Mark. 1991. The emergence of postsuburbia" in Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (eds.), Chapter 1 (pp 1-30), Post-suburban California: The transformation of Orange County since World War II. Berkeley, California. University of California Press.
Mumford, Lewis. 1963. The Highway and the City. New York, Harcourt, Brace and World.
Rheingold, Howard. 1996. "Will The Web Evolve Communities?"