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Tacit user and developer frames in user-led collection development: the case of the digital water education library

Published: 07 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

This paper discusses the impact that developers' and users' tacit understandings can have on digital library development. It draws on three years of ethnographic research with the Digital Water Education Library (DWEL) that focused on the observation, collection, and analysis of the project's face-to-face and electronic organizational communication. The DWEL project involved formal and informal educators in the development of its collection, and experienced problems at the start of the project with getting these educators to complete their cataloguing tasks. The research showed that despite having spent several days in face-to-face workshops, the project's PIs and the educators had different tacit understandings of what digital libraries were, that were impeding the project's organizational communication and workflow. I describe how these differences were identified and analyzed, and subsequently addressed and mediated through the design and development of online tools that acted as boundary objects between the PIs and the educators.

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cover image ACM Conferences
JCDL '05: Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
June 2005
450 pages
ISBN:1581138768
DOI:10.1145/1065385
  • General Chair:
  • Mary Marlino,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Tamara Sumner,
  • Frank Shipman
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 June 2005

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Author Tags

  1. DLESE
  2. DWEL
  3. ethnography
  4. organizational knowledge
  5. participatory design practical knowledge
  6. tacit knowing
  7. tacit knowledge
  8. technological frames

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View all
  • (2014)Technological FramesSAGE Open10.1177/21582440145267204:1(215824401452672)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2014
  • (2014)Implications of dominant technological frames over a longitudinal periodInformation Systems Journal10.1111/isj.1200624:3(207-228)Online publication date: 1-May-2014
  • (2013)The user-centered development and testing of a dublin core metadata toolProceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries10.1145/2467696.2467739(249-252)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2013
  • (2012)Finding ProblemsProceedings of the 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences10.1109/HICSS.2012.279(1615-1624)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2012
  • (2010)Merging metadataProceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries10.1145/1816123.1816180(361-364)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2010
  • (2008)Digital art 2.0Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts10.1145/1413634.1413667(158-165)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2008
  • (2007)AssetCollector: a system for managing collections of cultural assetsInternational Journal on Digital Libraries10.1007/s00799-007-0028-38:1(61-78)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2007
  • (2006)A sociotechnical framework for evaluating a large-scale distributed educational digital libraryProceedings of the 10th European conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries10.1007/11863878_40(449-452)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2006

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