In his 1990 CSCW paper "interface," Grudin warns us about thinking in terms of "users" (Grudin, 1990). It is a sure way of homogenizing distinct people and practices. So who might be included under our apparently deceptive rubric of users, the center of our design methods and evaluation? Are they the information brokers that Clifford Lynch described in his keynote at the Digital Libraries '95 meeting, working in the interests of unspecified clients, carefully maintaining the confidentiality of their information needs? Are they school children, who (by the most optimistic accounts) are using distributed resources to research their homework and to learn from adult scholars and potential mentors? Are they homeless people, typing at freely accessible terminals in the community library, entering into the public discourse that forms around the library as an institution (in his recent Nation article, Shapiro posed the provocative question of whether the Internet will become "Cyberkeley" or "Cyberbia")? Thus a second key problem is the heterogeneity of communities and their practices.

The second part of my question, "and what are they doing here?" refers to the changes in practices that are bound to take place. We already hear much about the changes in human attention wrought by information technologies (see David Levy's thoughtful piece "I'm not here right now to take your call: Technology and the politics of absence," in which he laments the trend toward the fragmentation of attention or Michael Joyce's recent address to the ALA meeting in which he asserts "a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings"). This is particularly relevant when we introduce a technology such as hypertext, which openly seeks to change the nature of reading and writing (see for example Bolter, 1991). We also see drastic changes in other use-related aspects of the library, most importantly in publishing and librarianship; the World-Wide Web seems to have transformed thousands of people -- students, humanists, scientists -- into amateur catalogers, organizing and indexing materials for an unknown, unseen, and possibly unappreciative audience.

Will readers and writers in the electronic library still read and write the way we read and write today? Will publishers and librarians fill the same roles? Already striking evidence exists that they won't (McKnight discusses the blurring of these roles in his discussions of his experiences with electronic journals in McKnight, 1994). My collaborator, Judy Malloy, and I have also observed hypertext readers engaged in "interrupted readings," in which readers follow links before they are necessarily ready to, just because the links are there for the clicking.

My own interest in digital library use stems from my experiences studying and developing technologies (in particular, collaborative hypertextual technologies) for analysts engaged in information-intensive intellectual work, gathering, scanning, reading, and organizing materials to make sense of complex situations in the world. These analysts are one important kind of user for digital libraries, and generally have been useful as a foil in examining the assumptions underlying the new technologies. In my studies, I have used simple methods like interview, direct observation, and acting as a technological intermediary (i.e., acting as a surrogate user interface to information technologies to better understand the analysts' interactions with technology). The technology development and introduction side of my work has involved a series of prototypes and envisionments (the technology acts as a vehicle for "what ifs," rather than as a practical means of supporting today's work).

One of the most valuable aspects of both the studies and the technology introduction seems to lie in their communicative power, both within the organization and to other technologists. For example, the analysts liked the interview process, since it provided them with a way to talk to their management about technology without being personally culpable for "technophobia" -- a damning label for many. Interviews with the support staff made them a less invisible part of the work (they in fact turned out to be some of the principal users of information retrieval technologies, and thus a vital constituency). Interviews with the analysts' managers allowed them to express visions for the future that revealed political directions. Introducing technology allowed us to see dramatic differences in apparently similar user populations, and the ways in which the technology was used to political ends (competition among members of an organization led to the introduction of competing technologies and head-to-head evaluations). The results never failed to be surprising.

To this end, I am interested in new methods for representing activity, interaction, technology, and the materials themselves -- in providing the means to communicate about practice (see Blomberg et al., 1994) to support the dialog among the interested parties. This dialog will be vital in the design and introduction of useable and accepted technologies in the heterogeneous libraries of the future.

References

(Blomberg et al., 1994) Blomberg, J., Suchman, L., & Trigg, R. "Reflections on a Work-Oriented Design Project." In R. Trigg, S. I. Anderson, & E. Dykstra-Erickson (Eds.), Proceedings of PDC'94: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference. Palo Alto, CA, October. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, P.O. Box 717, Palo Alto, CA 94302-0717, pp. 99-109.

(Bolter, 1991) Bolter, J.D. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1991.

(Grudin, 1990) Grudin, J. "interface." In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Los Angeles, CA, October 7-10, 1990, pp. 269-278.

(Joyce, 1995) Joyce, M. The lingering errantness of place. A talk given at the ACRL/LITA Joint Presidents Program, American Library Association, 114th Annual Conference, Chicago, June 26, 1995.

(Levy, 1995) Levy, D.M. I'm not here right now to take your call: Technology and the politics of absence. Oksnoen Symposium, spring 1995.

(Levy and Marshall, 1995) Levy D. and Marshall, C.C. "Going Digital: A Look at Assumptions Underlying Digital Libraries." Communications of the ACM 38, 4 (April 1995), pp. 77-84.

(McKnight, 1994) McKnight, C., Meadows, J., Pullinger, D., and Rowland, F. "ELVYN -- Publisher and Library Working Towards the Electronic Distribution and Use of Journals," In Proceedings of Digital Libraries '94, College Station, TX, June 19-21, 1994, pp. 6-11.

(Shapiro, 1995) Shapiro, A. L. "Street Corners in Cyberspace" The Nation, Vol. 261, Number 1, pp. 10-14.

(Schatz, 1994) Schatz, B., Bishop, A., Mischo, W., and Hardin, J. "Digital Library Infrastructure for a University Engineering Community" In Proceedings of Digital Libraries '94, College Station, TX, June 19-21, 1994, pp. 21-24.