Project Ethnography: An Anthropological Approach to Assessing Digital Library Services

Library Trends, Fall, 2000 by Michael Seadle

The human subjects in this case are university people, librarians, historians, engineers, education faculty, computer professionals, and others. Since I am a trained historian, a computer professional, and a librarian, I understand the language, the specialized words, the acronyms, and the implicit meanings of three of the subgroups. This is crucial in being able to describe their interests and intentions faithfully. I am also aware of how poorly I understand the meanings of, for example, the engineers, whose mathematical discourse far exceeds my last meager courses in calculus over thirty years ago.

The participant-observer must play two roles simultaneously. It is not always easy. One example of this problem comes from Frank Hamilton Cushing. In 1879, that influential ethnologist went to live among the Zuni and became so completely one of them that he participated in their secret rituals. Ultimately, he became a "Bow Priest," and destroyed many of his notes rather than betray Zuni secrets (Schoumantoff, 1999, pp. 143-44). Where does the participant leave off and the observer begin? There is no simple answer. Geertz (1995) writes: "It is a matter of living out your existence in two stories at once" (p. 94).

Use of the first person in anthropological articles has always been fairly common. It reminds readers of the filter through which they are viewing the world. The references in the body of this article come mainly from my notes, my memory, my records of conversations. I deliberately avoid naming individuals and quoting conversations as I have normally done when writing oral histories because of the ongoing, active, ever-delicate work relationships that could easily be damaged.

The rules of evidence in anthropology lack precision compared to some other social sciences. Clifford Geertz in particular has thought about this issue:

   The ability of anthropologists to get us to take what they say seriously
   has less to do with either a factual look or an air of conceptual elegance
   than it has with their capacity to convince us that what they say is a
   result of their having actually penetrated (or, if you prefer, been
   penetrated by) another form of life; of having, one way or another, truly
   "been there." (Geertz, 1988, pp. 4-5)

      ....Such, such are the facts. Or, anyway so I say. The doubts that
   arise, whether in me or my audience, have only very partially to do with
   the empirical basis on which these accounts, or others like them, rest. The
   canons of anthropological "proof" being what they are (mimicries of sterner
   enterprises like mechanics or physiology) that is, indeed, how such doubts
   are most often phrased and, to the degree they are, most often quieted.
   Footnotes help, verbatim texts help even more, detail impresses, numbers
   normally carry the day. But, in anthropology anyway, they remain somehow
   ancillary: necessary of course, but insufficient, not quite to the point.
   The problem--rightness, warrant; objectivity, truth--lies elsewhere, rather
   less accessible to dexterities of method. (Geertz, 1995, pp. 17-18)