The Challenges of Institutional Information Spaces
An Allerton '96 Statement of Interests
Roberta Lamb, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
(714)453-4000 x1340
FAX: (714)450-4559
An Allerton '96 Statement of Interests
Roberta Lamb, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
(714)453-4000 x1340
FAX: (714)450-4559
Will digital library (DL) researchers and their community of users mold the form, function and content of digital libraries? Or will institutional mandates and influences determine the shape and use of online information resources?
These provocative questions come from my recent research into what generates demand for online information (OI) resources. I have found that an organization's relationship with the major institutions of its industry largely determines how much and what kind of data it collects. Companies that directly interact with big regulatory organizations (BROs) gather more information than those that do not. These agencies define a docucentric form of communication that must be used when interacting with them. In effect, they define an institutional information space. Once adopted, this form of communication becomes taken for granted and influences how company members perceive the utility of various information resources.
Furthermore, the companies that directly interact with BROs seem to fill an important niche within their industry that assigns to them intensive information gathering and docucentric communication responsibilities, as well as an information technology provider role. Other, less well-resourced, industry organizations form alliances with them as they fulfill the regulatory requirements of that industry.
Do DL researchers consider these regulatory data gathering mandates and influences when planning the content and form of their library corpus? Do they know where the questions that organizations ask come from? Do they understand what drives organizational demand for digital libraries? An extensive DL/IS literature review doesn't bring ready answers to these questions, because information scientists have not directly addressed them in their theoretical work.
My research examines interorganizational phenomena and applies theoretical insights that shed light on this topic. And it leads me to suggest that an important challenge for DL researchers is to recognize and account for the mandates and the influences of BROs when planning current and future digital libraries.
I have focused my recent research on OI resources like Lexis/Nexis, STN, Dialog, Medline--the first commercially available online digital information resources. The providers of these services expect to make a profit, and they rely on a certain level of demand for the documents in their databases. I am keenly interested in what generates and sustains this demand, and what these early services tell us about digital libraries.
I am also interested in how OI resources are used in non-academic contexts. As I mentioned in a paper I wrote for DL '95 where I examined assumptions about use and usability of OI resources:
"Discussions of digital library implementations often assume academic contexts of use. However, the information technologies that will comprise digital libraries will also be available to corporate consumers, government organizations and individuals. Effective implementation of digital libraries, more broadly conceived, may be less a matter of identifying appropriate usage scenarios for scholarly research than of understanding online information (OI) resource usage by a larger consumer constituency."[4]
Understanding the OI consumer constituency and what motivates them has led me to examine the pervasive "world-view" and socio-technical expectations of an information society, and to suggest alternative visions of information infrastructures.[3] I have also worked closely with my Ph.D. advisor, Rob Kling, to analyze the power of perspectives to shape IT research.[1]
These examinations have led me to look for common influences shaping the use of OI resources and the roles of intermediaries in my research studies. They have encouraged me to analyze interorganizational relationships in an informational context when seeking answers to OI resource demand questions.[2] When considering DL projects, I now view them as interdisciplinary constructions and envision DL use scenarios as inherently interorganizational.
Therefore, I tend to view my study findings about BROs and informational information spaces as reflections of an over-arching documentary epistemology that also guides DL conceptions. This docucentric view of the world has been studied and described by Joanne Yates as a 100-year shift toward more documentation activities and increased control through documentary forms of communication. It is a shift away from more personal forms of knowledge. My research suggests that this general shift is a common influence shaping the use of OI resources and the roles of intermediaries.
Postmodern philosophers like Foucault have noted this shift and have described databases as the site of bureaucratic power, with information serving as the sustaining materiel of bureaucracy, and online databases becoming the major structural component of domination in postindustrial society. I have not seen DL researchers conceptualizing their constructions in quite this way. But is powered use out of scope?
My research shows how BROs influence the formations of interorganizational relationships--so that less well-resourced organizations are encouraged to use "other peoples' information"--their information capital--just as financial institutions indirectly encourage corporations to use "other peoples' money" or "OPM."
I have also seen that when companies form interorganizational relationships, they often search online to learn about and evaluate a competitor, a potential partner or a subcontractor. Corporate managers and owners extend the constellation of other organizations that they deal with based on their beliefs about the character of those organizations. They judge those characters in part by "profiling" or constructing corporate identities from the information they find online. Brenda Dervin has identified the sense-making and reality construction capabilities of digital information, but has not extended her discussions into the realm of corporate power and competitive intelligence. However, DLs may be used in this way.
My research brings non-academic contexts into DL consideration. It also begins to address some questions that DL researchers have asked about non-use or very limited use of OI resources. It provides rational explanations of users who retrieve documents, as required by BROs, but do not read them; and who engage in defensive data gathering practices and local library formation in advance of potential litigation.
My studies provide a few of the contextualized use scenarios called for in Allerton '95. I believe that these could provide a basis for enhancing understandings of effective use and DL evaluation, and I hope that they will introduce discussions of socially powered DL use.
For my part, I expect to extend my understanding of how the DL researcher community conceives of non-academic use of DLs. My analytical research has shown that expectations for use are critically important to both users and providers of OI resources. I also hope to gain a better understanding of my own research through the insights of Allerton participants.
1. "Analyzing Alternate Visions of Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries," with Rob Kling in Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, eds. Gregory B. Newby and Robin P. Peek, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1996.
2. "Interorganizational Relationships and Online Information Resources," in Proceedings of the 29th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences - Vol 5 Digital Documents, p.82, January, 1996.
3. "Informational Imperatives and Socially Mediated Relationships," in The Information Society, Vol 12, No. 1, 1996.
4. "Using Online Information Resources: Reaching for the *.*'s," in Digital Libraries '95 Conference Proceedings, p.137, 1995.
5. "Building A Better Fit: Revising Expectations About How Organizations Use Online Information Resources," in National Online Meeting Proceedings--1995, Learned Information, Inc., Medford, NJ, p. 243, 1995.
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