Project Ethnography: An Anthropological Approach to Assessing Digital Library Services

Library Trends, Fall, 2000 by Michael Seadle

ABSTRACT

OFTEN LIBRARIES TRY TO ASSESS DIGITAL LIBRARY SERVICE for their user populations in comprehensive terms that judge its overall success or failure. This article's key assumption is that the people involved must be understood before services can be assessed, especially if evaluators and developers intend to improve a digital library product. Its argument is simply that anthropology can provide the initial understanding, the intellectual basis, on which informed choices about sample population, survey design, or focus group selection can reasonably be made. As an example, this article analyzes the National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW). It includes brief descriptions of nine NGSW micro-cultures and three pairs of dichotomies within these micro-cultures.

INTRODUCTION

   Questions rained down, and continue to rain down,.... Questions about the
   coherence of life-ways, the degree to which they form connected wholes.
   Questions about their homogeneity, the degree to which everyone in a tribe,
   or even a family (to say nothing of a nation or civilization) shares
   similar beliefs, practices, habits, feelings. Questions about discreteness,
   the possibility of specifying where one culture, say the Hispanic, leaves
   off, and the next, say the Amerindian, begins. (Geertz, 1995, pp. 42-43)

Geertz's words are relevant here. Often libraries try to assess digital library service in comprehensive terms that judge its overall success or failure for their user populations. A variety of methods are used: surveys, usage statistics, standards, and occasionally even focus groups. All of these methods have their virtues and can offer valuable information as part of an assessment process, but misuse is common.

It is tempting to assume coherence and homogeneity among the many populations that use any complex digital library, or at least to assume discrete boundaries between certain populations. Students, for example, from a population that could include people from high school through graduate school and English majors to engineers. A bright high school student may also be taking college classes, and an undergraduate could well have an English-engineering double major. It is also tempting to assume that the developers of a complex digital library project have agreed on common service goals rather than separate (though, it is hoped, symbiotic) priorities. A service goal of making material accessible might, for example, mean a search algorithm to one of the developers, index structure to another, and subject categories to a third. Treating them as indistinguishable parts of a common product loses key information which would help to identify problems and improve services.

This article does not offer anthropology as a substitute methodology for evaluating digital library services. Anthropology as practiced today seeks to be relatively non-judgmental, even in a good cause. It tries instead to observe accurately and to lay out the dynamics of interactions in ways that explain situations and behaviors. This article's key assumption is that the people involved must be understood before services can be assessed. Its argument is simply that anthropology can provide the initial understanding, the intellectual basis, on which informed choices about sample population, survey design, or focus group selection can reasonably be made. It offers a first step, but one which, if ignored, can trip the most sophisticated evaluation scheme.

METHODOLOGY

The standard method for research in cultural anthropology is to find a set of people, learn their language and everything else known about them, and then live with them long enough to come away with new insight and understanding. At one time, the people tended to come from remote tribes, like Margaret Mead's (1932) Samoans. Later the pool grew to include ex-colonial territories--people from complex, but non-western, civilizations, such as Clifford Geertz's (1956) Indonesians. More recently, cultural anthropologists have taken an active interest in aspects of contemporary western society such as John Borneman's (1992) Germans or Bonnie Nardi's (1999) corporate librarians. The methodology for this article follows a similar pattern.

Language is a particularly important aspect of the methodology, even when an English speaker is dealing with other English-speaking Americans. Words do not always convey a simple dictionary meaning, especially across cultural and disciplinary boundaries. "Research," for example, means something with books, articles, archives, and footnotes to the historian, but generally implies mathematics, experimentation, hypothesis, and results to an engineer. The same word conjures up different approaches and different products to differently trained people. The nuances of meaning matter, especially in understanding what the real service goals of a project are. For a study like this, the language training consists not of foreign words but of foreign concepts, acronyms, even symbols (e.g., [Sigma]).