ARIADNE Project on Digital Libraries · Publications
In Vine (1999) 109, 10-15 (special issue on Virtual communities and information services).David M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale*
dmn@comp.lancs.ac.uk | twidale@uiuc.edu
Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YR UK
* Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61820, USA
This paper describes how an area of computer science research, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, can be applied to the world of libraries. Collaborative activities can be described by whether they occur in the same time and in the same place. These activities can be broadly arranged into three groups depending on the participants: staff-staff, user-staff and user-user interactions. Applying computer technology to these activities requires careful consideration of the work practices involved and the costs and benefits of any changes.
This paper attempts to describe how an area of computer science research, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), can be applied to the world of libraries. We discuss how a CSCW approach can be used to analyse the collaborative activities that may occur within traditional libraries and use it to consider how to design the digital libraries of the future.
CSCW is a research area that examines issues relating to the design of computer systems to support people working together. This seemingly all-encompassing definition is in part a reaction to what has been seen as a set of implicit design assumptions in many computer applications - that they are intended to support users do their work on their own. In cases where a scarce resource (such as early computers themselves, or a database, or even a digital library) has to be shared; systems designers have minimised the effects of this shared activity and tried to create the illusion of the (presumed ideal) case of exclusive access to resources. We see the same assumptions in discussion of digital libraries as a way of offering access to resources without the need to compete with (or even be aware of the existence of) other library users.
By contrast, CSCW acknowledges that people work together as a way of managing complex tasks. Despite the wilder claims of Artificial Intelligence, not all these tasks can be automated. Thus it is sensible to design systems that allow people to collaborate more effectively. This can also open up opportunities for collaboration that have previously been impossible, overly complex or too expensive; such as working not merely with colleagues in the same office, but via video and audio links with colleagues in a different building or on a different continent. CSCW has a strong interdisciplinary tradition, drawing of researchers from computer science, sociology, management, psychology and communication. Although the bulk of this article is about how CSCW might be used in libraries, it is also our the contention that CSCW should also be informed by work in library and information science (11).
The world of CSCW is often described in terms of the time and space in which a collaborative activity occurs. Collaboration can be between people in the same place (co-located) or different places (remote). Collaboration can be at the same time (synchronous) or separated in time (asynchronous). Figure 1 illustrates the possibilities.
Figure 1 - The CSCW spatial and temporal quadrants
Examples from the various quadrants are:
Work in CSCW can be said to have originated in the work of Englebart in the early 1960s (11). The focus was on supporting synchronous remote working. This, the most 'glamorous' application and the one perhaps offering the most exciting technical engineering challenges, remains a heavy focus of interest. The assumed uses of these technologies is itself a fruitful way of understanding the growth of the research field and indeed the sociology of science-engineering. All too often the work has been technology led: 'let's see what we can build and leave it to other (lesser) minds to worry about what it might be useful for'. Nevertheless, some potential applications recur as spurs to technological innovation. These include meeting support (so many highly paid people spend so much of their time in meetings and the costs of assembling geographically dispersed executives is so expensive that it justifies the costs of developing expensive early prototypes), collaborative writing (something the researchers themselves do and so are very familiar with) and time-critical applications with safety or high cost implications such as air traffic control, hospital work or trading in the City. Although much work in the emerging Information Economy necessarily involves the search for, production of, manipulation of and distribution of information, this has not received the attention it deserves in prompting CSCW research into new areas and applications.
A balancing trend to the technology-led approach has been the significant involvement of ethnographers in CSCW research. They apply techniques traditionally used within sociology and anthropology to understand what it is that people actually do in their work. This can reveal many subtleties about work practice, the handling of exceptions and the problems that can arise with existing computer technologies that can help in the design of more appropriate systems (8).
Although relatively little is written about direct experience of applying CSCW technologies to libraries, it is an interesting and important issue to explore. Since there are various different technologies and different ways of working collaboratively and different contexts of work activity in a library, it can help to have a means for structuring the various options. One approach is to try to apply the CSCW quadrant - Figure 2 shows an adapted quadrant for libraries and information science (LIS) (11).
The traditional paper-based library operates mainly in the co-located and synchronous quadrant. As computer technologies have advanced more activity has moved to the remote half where users access library services via network connections. The interest in Digital Libraries can be broadly represented on Figure 2 as a move from the top left to the bottom right; although, as the term 'hybrid library' emphasises, libraries will continue to operate in all four of the quadrants.
Figure 2 - The CSCW spatial and temporal quadrants with LIS examples
We focus here on the potential of CSCW to support library activities that are more specialised (even though they may have parallels with activities in other organisations). We can see collaboration occurring in a library in three ways: (1) among staff members, (2) among users and staff members, and (3) among users.Despite the stereotypes, librarians are not solitary types. Just as other workers do, they interact, both formally and infomally, with colleagues to get their work done. One of the great contributions of ethnography to CSCW has been to reveal the complexity of these kinds of interactions. They can be both formalised, where a complex task is broken down and tackled by a number of people with varying levels and different kinds of expertise, and also informal, where a problem arises and people creatively use their colleagues as resources to help them work around the problem and come up with innovative solutions. Frequently, ethnographic studies have revealed the creativity and flexibility with which people deal with exceptions to the normal flow of work. This is important to understand, because otherwise a systems developer is inclined to only implement computerised support for the 'normal' or even 'correct' way of working, removing the possibility of people using creative workarounds and causing the system to fail as exceptions inevitably occur.
Studies of help desks show that problems are often solved by teams of staff or are referred 'upward' to subject librarians (1; 9). Another example of staff-staff collaboration occurs in the solving of particularly complex reference questions. This can use a range of technologies and degrees of formality from approaching an acknowledged expert, to an informal chat over coffee, to telephoning a colleague, emailing an old friend from library school days, or posting to a bulletin board or mailing list.
Staff-staff collaboration can be learning-oriented as well as work-oriented. A powerful and effective way of acquiring skills is by working alongside more experienced colleagues (5). Although originating in pre-industrial societies this apprenticeship learning is equally important in the advanced 21st century knowledge organisation that a well-run library should already prefigure. With increasing use of various computerised information systems, the growth in number of databases and the rapid change in updates to software there is a permanent training/learning need. People always need to learn new things, even if it is just what is different in the latest version of Microsoft Word. We are investigating the kinds of brief, informal learning episodes that occur in all organisations that effect this learning. We term them Over The Shoulder Learning for obvious reasons. Again it should be noted that this learning is very often social and collaborative (although it may not be noticed or encouraged by management) People sometimes find it difficult to learn from manuals or on-screen help. Training courses may not be available, or there may be no time to take them. Thus, they learn from their friends and colleagues. It would help to understand this process better, to consider how to teach techniques on how to be a better learner (and a bettter teacher) in an OTSL episode, and to develop functionalities into computer systems to support this process.
Collaboration between users and staff in traditional libraries is most evident at the help or reference desk. Users' problems are (hopefully) resolved through an interaction which, for the most part, relies on both people being present in the same place at the same time. Libraries have often provided additional services to support users who are not in the physical library. Remote interaction has occurred for some time, using letters, internal mail and particularly the telephone. One of the simplest computerised approaches to the same issue has been to set up an email reference desk service, e.g. (3). For a comprehensive review of approaches to remote reference see (7).
When library staff try to collaborate with users who are not 'in' their library, their job becomes much more difficult. As anyone who has used a software phone helpline can testify, solving problems becomes a lot harder when you lose the shared contextual information present by simply being next to someone. When a user has a problem in a physical library they often take a reading list (or similar piece of paper) with them when they seek help. On this paper are usually some records of what they have been doing and library staff use this information to understand the context of the user's problem. Indeed, we have observed that library staff at the help desk often almost 'snatch' at any piece of paper the user may be holding (1).
However, this shared context is precisely what is missing from remote (attempts at) collaboration. As the computer systems do not provide an easy way for users to record what they have been doing they cannot easily give this information to the library staff. Although users may claim that they have done x, y and z to try to satisfy their information need; it is often the case that they have done x, attempted to do y (but failed) and accidentally done q instead of z. Although library systems and remote databases are often quite good at supporting the hits resulting from a search they are often less effective at supporting the process of searching (10). This process information is exactly what is needed for effective collaborations in remote help-giving situations.
Alternative technologies for supporting remote collaboration between users and staff include video conferencing and dedicated network-friendly (e.g. Java-based) solutions. A prototype remote reference system has been developed at the University of Edinburgh which allows a librarian to 'take control' of a user's session with a database; in the same way that someone might take over your keyboard if they were sitting next to you (6).
A key aspect of the introduction of technology into libraries is how it changes the jobs of the staff. As users interact via technology then the staff have to adapt their work practices to fulfil their service role. For a discussion of the impact of these changes on library staff see (2).
Physical libraries restrict collaborations between users in several ways. In addition to an atmosphere that discourages talking, a collaborative meeting first requires people to be in the same time and same place (in their local library). Once technology allows users to extend their presence over time and space then user-user collaboration becomes much simpler and potentially more important than collaborative activities involving staff.
Examples of user-user collaboration include the facility to leave annotations and evaluations on documents so that subsequent users are presented with more than the simple documents. A particularly interesting example (shown as 'social information filtering' in Figure 2) is where groups of ratings supplied by users can be used to filter a set of documents for another user. There are too many of these systems to describe in this paper; for a review see (12).
When trying to build computer systems that will help people to work together more productively we have to take into account a number of factors. These can be expressed by the following questions:
This is known as the socio-technical design challenge. It involves determining what should be built not merely by reference to what is technically possible, but what would be useful to the organisation and acceptable to the organisation. Collaborative work is necessarily social. Thus a system that flouts social rules, norms or customs, even if it does useful things, may fail to be used.
The key to selecting, or developing, successful collaborative systems appears to involve an understanding of what is currently done, and designing systems that not only can mesh with that way of working, but can adapt gracefully as people change their way of working over time. One important lesson that has been learned from CSCW systems implementation is to pay close attention to the distribution of costs and benefits resulting from a change in work practice (4). Although a new system may be beneficial for an organisation as a whole it can still fail. If the new system imposes extra work for many people in order to benefit others, there will be a natural reluctance to use it. Sometimes this can be overcome if management determine that it is a requirement to use the system, but even so, it is sometimes possible for workers to sabotage such a disliked system by blaming it for all the inevitable problems that arise. If the system can be designed so that everyone using it benefits somewhat (by its improving their work problems) then acceptance and adoption will be far more likely to be successful.
Another approach to the introduction of new technology is to acknowledge that humans and computers are suited to different types of activities. Computers are good at laborious, repetitive and memory intensive tasks; humans are good at creative, inter-personal and tasks requiring broad knowledge, common sense and judgement. We believe that the most productive applications of computers in libraries will occur when computers do the boring jobs leaving the humans to concentrate on other tasks. This approach suggests that we should be aiming for supportive software rather than the trying to replace humans with a computerised 'intelligent expert'.
It is our contention that libraries, their use and the work that occurs in them has an important social dimension that is often ignored or masked by the stereotype of the silent institution full of lonely scholars. CSCW is a body of computer systems research and development that acknowledges the collaborative nature of much of people's work activities. We believe that the application of CSCW technologies could greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of work in and around libraries. This involves interactions between users and library staff, but also between users and between library staff. It holds true both for physical and digital collections and combinations of the two, and also for activity within the library, and extending the possibilities of interactions with library resources, including the expertise of the library staff across time and space. Furthermore, we believe that libraries, as information organisations with a long history of addressing the problems of organising information access, have much to contribute to research and development in CSCW.
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