1 Introduction : Digital Libraries as Sociotechnical Systems

This book is about digital libraries as sociotechnical systems—networks of technology, information, documents, people, and practices. It is about digital libraries’ interactions with the larger world of work, institutions, knowledge, and society, as well as with the production of knowledge. And it is about creating, managing, and evaluating DLs. The term digital library (DL) encompasses a wide range of working systems and research prototypes, collections of information and documents, and technologies.1 Much of the discussion about DLs is about technology or about specific applications (e.g., Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2001). This book takes a different approach. We are interested in understanding the social aspects of DLs—not just social impacts but the web of social and material relations within which DLs operate. This book originated in the work of its editors and authors in designing, evaluating, and simply trying to understand DLs and their uses. Initially, this book was to be about DL evaluation, but it rapidly became apparent to the authors and editors that we were concerned with much more. We began with the belief that a good DL is useful. Like a traditional library, a useful DL fits the needs, activities, and contexts of the people who use it, as well as those of the people who create it, operate it, and contribute to its content. The more we delved into DLs and their social worlds, the more we found ourselves drawn into questions not just about DLs but about documents, collections, and classification; activity, work, and knowledge; politics and values; institutions; and identity, organizations, and communities. The contributors to this volume see technology as ‘‘embedded in the social world in complicated ways, and this is particularly true for digital libraries, which are intertwined with the cognitive processes of a complex society’’ (Philip E. Agre, chapter 9). DLs form part of a long history of the mutual constitution of knowledge, documents, technology, and the social (David M. Levy, chapter 2).