Supporting Community-Building and Collaboration in Digital Libraries Adam Worrall LIS 6279 Research in LIS Fall 2009 Dr. Melissa Gross.
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Supporting Community-Building and Collaboration in Digital
Libraries
Adam WorrallLIS 6279 Research in LIS
Fall 2009Dr. Melissa Gross
Digital libraries (DLs)
Two camps (Borgman, 1999)
“content collected on behalf of user communities”
“institutions or services”
Both are requiredLevy and Marshall (1995)
○ DL as social environmentBearman (2007)
Communities and networks Communities of practice
Lave and WengerGroups of “people working together on
the same or similar tasks” (Brown & Duguid, 2002, p. 141)
Restricted to within a particular organization
Networks of practice (Brown & Duguid, 2002)Not restricted; larger, broader groupMay not even be aware of each other’s
existence
Communities and networks
Research problem
Existing DLs do not support well, through their content and services, the social context surrounding and within them
Should improve this support of social interactions to integrate better with social groups and communities (Lynch, 2005)
Significance
Most acknowledge DLs need communityNo DL without that community
Many researchers argue for need for DLs to consider social interactionsLevy and Marshall (1995)Marshall and Bly (2004)Lynch (2005)Pomerantz and Marchionini (2007)Gazan (2008)
Exploratory, pilot study How successfully does the D-
Scholarship2 digital library prototype support community-building by those users, communities, and networks that use its content and services?
How successfully does the D-Scholarship2 digital library prototype support collaboration by its users?
Research questions
Failures CKESS (Bieber et al., 2002) CYCLADES (Candela & Straccia, 2003) Sharium model (Marchionini, 1999)
American Front Porch (AFP) (Sonnenwald et al., 1999)
Open Video Digital Library (OVDL) (Marchionini, Wildemuth, & Geisler, 2006)
Reasons:Overly ambitious; too many methods usedLack of fundingUnhealthy level of idealism
Flawed approaches Using external tools (Hull, Pettifer, & Kell, 2008)
Restrictive definition of digital libraries as database
Group commonality (Papatheodorou, Kapidakis, Sfakakis, & Vassiliou, 2003)Quantitative log miningNarrow definition of communities as those with
common search query vocabulary Physical paradigm, system-centered rather
than user-centered services Overly simplistic, anachronistic research
Relative successes Social annotations
AnswerBag (Gazan, 2008)
○ Web 2.0 question-and-answer site○ Faced many of the same challenges as DLs○ Highly successful; > 1 million users○ Shows promise of social annotations method
Situated context (Bishop et al., 2000)
Examine digital library use in context of not just individual needs and behavior, but also interactions between users and others in the community
Relative successes
Situated context (continued)DeLIver (University of Illinois) (Bishop et al., 2000)
○ Large sample sizes, many (mixed) methods○ Heavy use by graduate students and faculty○ Must look at differences between groups,
communities, even still individuals○ Must take social context into account
Further study required
Social constructionism (Tuominen, Talja, & Savolainen, 2003)Places “the primary emphasis on discourse”
(p. 564)
ScholOnto○ Prototype used social constructionism theory○ Provided for collaboration○ Appears moribund
Conversation-based and centered○ Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Google Wave
Further study required
WikisSurprisingly little digital library-specific
researchPlanetMath (Krowne, 2003)
○ “commons-based peer production (CBPP)” (Introduction)
○ Used wiki model with some changes○ Identified five challenges○ Met them well○ Successful; over 2,500 entries
Further study required
Wikis (continued)Problems and issues
○ Often found difficult to use (e.g. Chu, 2008)
○ Not used for patron collaboration in physical libraries (Bejune, 2007)
Conclusions○ Must educate users○ Must use socio-technical approach
Further study required Social network analysis (Garton,
Haythornthwaite, Wellman, 1997)Range
○ Size and heterogeneity of social networkDensity
○ How many relations and ties actually occur, compared to theoretical maximum
Measures have face validity for measuring DL community-building
No literature applying it to digital library users and/or communities
Population Users of D-Scholarship2
Prototype of digital library for scholarly publications and gray literature
Currently under development at FSUTesting group: 500 total
○ 300 upper-level undergraduates○ 150 graduate students○ 50 faculty members
Note no freshmen, sophomores, staffCannot be generalized outside of FSU
Sampling
Sampling frameE-mail addresses and roles for testing group
Stratified, systematic random sample200 participants
○ 45 faculty (oversampled)○ 66 graduate students○ 89 undergraduate students (undersampled)
Random number generators to be used for sampling interval, starting point
Survey Administration Pre-test
5+ doctoral students and/or faculty from SLIS15 from main study sampling frame
○ 5 from each stratum
Identification stringe.g. “G538”, “U293”, “F941”Letter identifies roleThree random numbers
○ Unique across entire sampleKept securely, confidentially by researcher
Survey Administration Main study
Initial e-mail with letter○ Study purpose○ Benefits○ Informed consent disclaimer○ Contact information○ Identification string○ Link to survey web site
Further e-mails○ 2 weeks, 5 weeks (modified letter stressing
benefits)Data collection finished at 8 weeks
Survey Instrument Operational measures of
Community-buildingCollaborationBoth drawn partly from social network
analysisOther dimensions independently constructedAllow for socio-technical analysis
Design and hostingFSU-hosted, researcher-created web siteQuestions grouped into pages
○ Not to overwhelm participants
Other Considerations Response rate
Expected to be high○ Testing group already testing DL○ No ethical issues○ Careful pretesting
Validity and reliabilityRelatively high
○ Social network analysis measures have high face validity
○ Pretest should help ensure high validity○ Reliability should be high within population as
defined
Other Considerations Limitations
Limited generalizability○ Narrowly defined population○ Further research required with other DLs
Cannot find best method○ D-Scholarship2 doesn’t use all methods○ Further research required with other DLs
Ethical considerationsNo issues; no coercion, deception, very little
risk, little to no harm, informed consent
References Bearman, D. (2007). Digital libraries. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 41, 223-272.
doi:10.1002/aris.2007.1440410112 Bejune, M. M. (2007). Wikis in libraries. Information Technology and Libraries, 26(3), 26-38. Bieber, M., Engelbart, D., Furuta, R., Hiltz, S. R., Noll, J., Preece, J., . . . Van de Walle, B. (2002). Toward virtual
community knowledge evolution. Journal of Management Information Systems, 18(4), 11-35. Bishop, A. P., Neumann, L. J., Star, S. L., Merkel, C., Ignacio, E., & Sandusky, R. J. (2000). Digital libraries: Situating use
in changing information infrastructure. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51, 394-413. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(2000)51:4<394::AID-ASI8>3.0.CO;2-Q
Borgman, C. L. (1999). What are digital libraries? Competing visions. Information Processing and Management, 35, 227-243. doi:10.1016/S0306-4573(98)00059-4
Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2002). The social life of information (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Candela, L., & Straccia, U. (2004). The personalized, collaborative digital library environment CYCLADES and its
collections management. In J. Callan, F. Crestani, & M. Sanderson (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Vol. 2924. Distributed Multimedia Information Retrieval (pp. 156-172). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
Chu, S. K.-W. (2008). TWiki for knowledge building and management. Online Information Review, 32, 745-758. doi:10.1108/14684520810923917
Garton, L., Haythornthwaite, C., & Wellman, B. (1997). Studying online social networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(1). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue1/garton.html
Gazan, R. (2008). Social annotations in digital library collections. D-Lib Magazine, 14(11/12). doi:10.1045/november2008-gazan
Hull, D., Pettifer, S. R., & Kell, D. B. (2008). Defrosting the digital library: Bibliographic tools for the next generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10). doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
Krowne, A. (2003). Building a digital library the commons-based peer production way. D-Lib Magazine, 9(10). doi:10.1045/october2003-krowne
References Levy, D. M., & Marshall, C. C. (1995). Going digital: A look at the assumptions underlying digital libraries.
Communications of the ACM, 38(4), 77-84. doi:10.1145/205323.205346 Lynch, C. (2005). Where do we go from here? The next decade for digital libraries. D-Lib Magazine, 11(7/8).
doi:10.1045/july2005-lynch Marchionini, G. (1999). Augmenting library services: Towards the sharium. In Proceedings of International Symposium on
Digital Libraries 1999 (pp. 40-47). Tsukuba, Japan: University of Library and Information Science. Retrieved from http://www.dl.slis.tsukuba.ac.jp/ISDL99/proceedings_ISDL99/isdl-1999-40.pdf
Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B. M., & Geisler, G. (2006). The Open Video Digital Library: A Möbius strip of research and practice. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57 , 1629-1643. doi:10.1002/asi.20336
Marshall, C. C., & Bly, S. (2004). Sharing encountered information: Digital libraries get a social life. In H. Chen, H. D. Wactlar, C. Chen, E.-P. Lim, & M. G. Christel (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEECS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 218-227). New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/996350.996401
Papatheodorou, C., Kapidakis, S., Sfakakis, M., & Vasiliou, A. (2003). Mining user communities in digital libraries. Information Technology and Libraries, 22, 152-157.
Pomerantz, J., & Marchionini, G. (2007). The digital library as place. Journal of Documentation, 63, 505-533. doi:10.1108/00220410710758995
Sonnenwald, D. H., Marchionini, G., Wildemuth, B. M., Dempsey, B. J., Viles, C. L., Tibbo, H. R., & Smith, J. B. (1999). Collaboration services in a participatory digital library: An emerging design. In Aparac, T., Saracevic, T., Ingwersen, P., & Vakkari, P. (Eds.), Digital libraries: Interdisciplinary concepts, challenges, and opportunities: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Conceptions of Library and Information Science (pp. 141-152). Lokve, Croatia: Benja Publishing. Retrieved from http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1314/01/colis-1999.pdf
Tuominen, K., Talja, S., & Savolainen, R. (2003). Multiperspective digital libraries: The implications of constructionism for the development of digital libraries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54 , 561-569. doi:10.1002/asi.10243
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