Project Ethnography: An Anthropological Approach to Assessing Digital Library Services

Library Trends, Fall, 2000 by Michael Seadle

Standards Groups

Several standards groups, both formal and informal, take an interest in the NGSW. An informal group has met for dinner at the American Library Association for the last several years to discuss the best practices for converting and maintaining sound in digital formats. Originally the word "preservation" was used, but that brought forth strenuous objections from one influential member. The offending word was dropped in order to make progress on the idea. Members of NISO (National Information Standards Organization, http://www.niso.org) committees, and the board have talked with one of the principal investigators about submitting a proposal, or perhaps a proposal for a proposal, on digital sound standards.

Similar conversations have taken place with the Library of Congress. The Association of American Archivists which, with the Library of Congress, sets the standards for the official EAD DTD (the Document Type Definition for Encoded Archival Description), may well also be involved with NGSW-recommended modifications to handle special tags for digital sound. The service objectives for these kinds of organizations have to do with detailed technically efficient proposals that can find broad acceptance among the professional audiences that are their end-users. These standards groups are particularly important for NGSW because, without their endorsement, much of the research and work remains idiosyncratic and local, and it becomes liable to revision when a better idea comes along.

MICRO-CULTURES DICHOTOMIES

Although these official institutional boundaries demark an important set of micro-cultures, several pairs of contending micro-cultures within these institutional groups also influence the outcome. These dichotomies occur both within units and within the minds of individuals. The principal investigators seem particularly liable to shifting sides, depending on how their training and experience matches particular circumstances.

Humanists versus Technicians

The humanists include historians, writing teachers, educators, and linguists. In general, they agree on a broad audience of students and researchers and on service expectations that resemble the search capabilities of a library's online catalog. They contributed most of the words to the original proposal and, perhaps because words are their principal tools, they dominate debate during project meetings. They tend also to misjudge the degree to which they really understand technical issues and often try to state service goals which the technicians shoot down as impossible. One example occurred during a discussion about searching the digital sound files, where several of the humanists realized for the first time that the technicians were proposing something quite different from the equivalent of full-text searching. One of the technicians told me later that he had explained this at least twice earlier in plain terms and wondered why anyone was surprised. What the humanists seem to have misunderstood was the engineering timeline. They imagined the caveats and limits referred only to unimportant short-term steps, not project-length goals.