My involvement with digital libraries goes back to two NSF-funded workshops I attended in 1992; I helped organize, and hosted, the second of these at PARC. These workshops helped lay the groundwork for the NSF/ARPA/NASA RFP, which was announced a year later. Of the six recipients of these awards, I have been most closely connected with the Stanford project, although in recent months, I have had increasing contact with the Berkeley project. I have also played an organizational role in two of the recent digital libraries conferences, Digital Libraries '94 in College Station, Texas, and Digital Libraries '95, in Austin.

As for the content of my research in this area, I'll briefly mention three recent pieces of work.

1. In "Fixed or Fluid? Document Stability and New Media" (Proceedings of ECHT'94), I examined the belief that as we move from a world of paper documents to one of digital documents we are also moving "from fixed to fluid." Materials on paper, this story goes, are largely fixed, static, permanent, etc., while digital materials are fluid, dynamic, impermanent, etc. I countered this story by arguing that all documents are fixed as well as fluid, that they hold things fixed for periods of time but are also changed to accomodate changing circumstances. Indeed, different types or genres of documents have different rhythms and rates of change. While there now exist many hundreds of genres of paper documents, we are at the early stages of developing genres of digital documents (e.g. multimedia genres, home pages) and, as part of this, their characteristic rhythms of fixity and fluidity.

2. In "What Color was George Washington's White Horse" (Proceedings of Digital Libraries '94) and "Going Digital: A Look at Assumptions Underlying Digital Libraries" (CACM, April 1995), Cathy Marshall and I suggested that the current conception of digital libraries is too narrow -- that the focus is on slowly changing, relatively permanent digital materials envisioned to be used by individuals (rather than groups). A more proper focus, we argued, would be on the collaborative use of collections of heterogeneous materials (paper and other media as well as digital materials), including quickly changing as well as slowly changing items, transient as well as permanent materials.

3. "Cataloging in the Digital Order" (Proceedings of Digital Libraries '95) reports on an exploration of traditional cataloging practices I conducted during the preceding year. My concern was to develop a deeper understanding of cataloging in order to evaluate the claims being made about the Net and the Web -- e.g. that new tools such as intelligent agents and other powerful search tools will obviate the need for professional cataloging. My conclusion was that cataloging is a richer and more important activity than most people, including many librarians, realize, and that it serves not only to provide access to collections but also to construct and stabilize the materials themselves.

In attending the Allerton Institute, I hope to be exposed to a range of methods for investigating and assessing use, and am particularly eager to listen in on the discussions and debates about the comparative value of different methods. I bring to the workshop a certain perspective on documents in use as well as knowledge that spans several relevant domains, including: technology, librarianship, and ethnographic methods.