Class Presentation Notes:
Selected Bibliography on Users and Electronic Community Networks

Uses and Users of Information -- LIS 391D.1 -- Spring 1997

Presentation

Section 1: Topic in General

B. Do any of the findings point to potential uses in archives.

A. Richness of the Literature Base
Started with the feeling that there would not be much research available

C. Need to Broaden more
Now want to broaden to archives and appraisal issues and the electronic record in general.

Section 2. What was Found

A. Good base of literature in Library Science

Some literature although dated in the specific arena of Archives dealing with users.

B. Growing number of studies on the Internet

Concentrated on only a few to benefit my overall understanding of data gathering which is being conducted.

C. Growing number of studies in the area of community networking
Over the past year and a number of more popular articles.

Most of the research recaps what is available, does not concentrate on users, questions the gap between what the original mission is and actual delivery that is occuring and encourages more public debate on the electronic network.

D. Tools which yielded the most
Searching the Internet and LISA.

E. Terminology used included:

• Community networks

• Civic networks

• Free-Nets

• Communitarianism

• Individual and Society

• Community organizations

• Collective responsibility

• Activism

• Community Information Services

• Community Information Systems

• Community research and development information systems

F. Tools used included:

• Library Literature

• Library and Information Science Abstracts

• Humanities Index

• Education Index

• PAIS

Section 3 What was found as it relates to my interest area:

A. Interest Area:

1. Community networks abound with nearly 300 of them counted and the number growing each day. They are defined many ways but nearly always have a common element of being related to a geographic center such as a city or a neighborhood. They contain the records of local discussions on local issues of importance at this time, lists of organizations in existence often with their missions and members noted, governmental information depicting not just the rules of government but the relationship of the government to its community. These networks are definitely recording the social history of our time and are of interest to me as an archivist.

2. Archivists have been criticized for failing to capture the social history from the bottom up. At one time, social history was a "fad" and largely ignored. In the 1970s and perhaps the 1960s when issues related to women and workers became important as research topics, archivists began to reassess traditional appraisal and acquisition policy and began to look for the "thick description" of culturally significant episodes as told by the participants themselves. This was largely in the form of oral history.

3. Along comes the electronic record, adding to the administrative complexity and technical dilemmas faced by archivists for many years. In this electronic record is the "thick description" of culturally significant episodes in the participants lives as recorded by them in what may turn out to be a faddish medium, but one that is very rich with information, the community network.

4. My thought is that we need to get these records into archives, preserve them, and wrestle with a number of questions such as (1) how much to save and (2) how can we encourage as much recording of the community as possible? Normally archivist are not the proactive creators of the record. It is not a role we normally assume.memory We need to wrestle with standards so that government records at all levels, church records, education records, and community records can all be retrieved in the future for their informational value about our culture.

B. Questions/Topics

1. To look at these questions, I wanted my initial literature review to examine the following topics:

a. Who uses archives and for what purpose?

I think I’ll find that historians and those interested in uncovering social history are among the user base interested in preservation of community network information, but ot all of the literature I read points to this. In fact, one article which researched historians found that they frequently do not use archives.

b. Does the content of the community network merit this examination and warrant the work?

I think I’ll find examples that point to the Yes answer. Already we find the Community Memory Alameda County War Memorial Project to memorialize World War II and Vietnam Veterans on-line in the Alameda County Area. We find the Blacksburg Electronic Village with its Nostalgia Project to gather and organize recollections and artifacts of longtime residents. These memory pages encourage people to write their memories down on the on-line network and for others to add their viewpoints to these memories. We find the Santa Cruz Public Library History section on-line which encourages community members to retell their version of local history on-line. All three of these projects were unknown to me when I began this assignment. All three received only brief mention in articles.

c. Who is working on archiving, a new word, this data? Who is currently acquiring this information for their repository? Who is working on the technical aspects of making this information available over the long term? I didn’t find anything here except the lists of community networks in existance which I can correlate with public libraries and archives that exist in various cities and communities.

d. Where are these community networks? Are there local history collections, local archives, public libraries, university libraries or archives at work answering these questions now in those cities?

• Austin has the Austin History Center and three lively community networks

• Seattle

• Denver

• Boulder

• Blacksburg, VA

• Cleveland

• Houston

• Berkeley

• Montana with Big Sky Telegraph

• New Orleans

e. Will these networks fail or succeed?

Grand projects such as Brewster Kahle’s project to preserve the entire Internet for posterity. What are the others?

f. Will these networks grow? How does federal telecommunications policy and local policy impact these networks?

Section 4 Organizing it all

A. I am at the beginning and have little perspective with which to evaluate reading of the literature and I’m not organized yet in terms of systems for notetaking and recording, consequently I became overwhelmed easily with this assignment. But, I sorted through and limited the bibliography to five key areas as a start.

1. Community Networking Articles

2. Community Networking Research

3. Users and Archival Practice

4. Information Science with an emphasis on Users

5. Internet Use and Measurement Research

Section 5: Specifics regarding Three Readings

A. Schuler, Doug. Community Networks: Building a New Participatory Medium. Communications of the ACM, January 1994.

Mr. Schuler has been active in the Seattle area and is a computing technologist in the Collaborative Computing department at Boeing Computer Services. His research interests are in computer-supported collaboration, participatory action research, community networks, and social implications of computing.

This article argues that community networking is a movement with great potential for renewing participation in the community. He lists the research issues as follows:

Developing collections of courseware, information, and services that can be made available electronically and effectively accessed and used by large numbers of the community’s members.

Developing user interfaces and information retrieval methods that promote effective access to a wide variety of information types from remote sites.

Exploiting existing wide-area information servers for sharing of information over a wide area as well as working with prototypes and next-generation information sharing applications

Conducting research on usage patterns and individual and collective on-line behavior.

Developing and evaluating models for effective learning and collaboration over distances.

Developing policy frameworks and analysis methodologies.

This article provides a brief survey of various community networks and then moves on to describe elements that are essential to the community network. His survey results are available on-line at the Seattle community network. Mr. Schuler has moved on to publish a book, New Community Networks: Wired for Change.

B. Conway, Paul. "Facts and Frameworks: An approach to Studying the Users of Archives", American Archivist, Fall, 1986.

Mr. Conway addresses the reluctance of the archival profession to develop a better understanding of its users. He views this as not a problem of method so much as a problem of will. In order to push forward, he proposes basic elements of information that should be recorded, analyzed, and shared among archivists and a scheme for gathering the information.

"Use of archival records is the ultimate purpose of identification and administration." declares the final report of the Society of American Archivists’ Task Force on Goals and Priorities.

Conway contends that archives need to look at the process of information transfer as a starting point for building user oriented services. Three parts of the process are the user, the information need, and the use. To collect data on users, he advocates the interview process. Information needs need to be uncovered. Why did this person visit the archive. Use is more than who used what, but goes into usefulness. These three items are matched with Quality, Integrity, and Value.

How good is the service,

How good is the protection of the archival information: Integrity, and Value has to do with the benefit or effectiveness issues. The suggestion is made that follow-up interviews or follow-up discussions be held with each researcher. He proposes a reference log which would help gather the data needed for systematic review of the program for to add to the needed body of research on focused on users.

Has anyone used this approach?

C. Caldwell, B.S. & Robertson, J. W. Community-based information technology services 1: What (some users want in Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century.

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dept. of Industrial Engineering.

Surveys of the broad community of potential Internet users suffer from many stumbling blocks including the fact than still a majority of the population base has no technological base of operation or social comfort with computer interaction. The town common or community network is a form which is developing and provides a way of gathering a focus on perspectives and attitudes of end users. They key to recognizing what service the public is interested in using and evaluating advancements required to make those services broadly available is to ask them. A survey of 600 users was conducted by Charles Piller in 1994. Of the 26 services presented, only 11 were considered of at least moderate interest by at least 50% of the respondents. Eight of those were primarily community oriented such as voting; searching newspapers and magazines, library catalogs, references, and obtaining information from schools or government. Only one service, video on demand was clearly commercial.

Given this inspiration, Caldwell and Robertson went on to develop a survey to help design a statewide project. Using a nominal group technique their advisory board group listed 22 potential services which could be offered in the community information network statewide. Two version of the convenience survey list were released and demographic responses were recorded for 80 respondents.

Nine items from the list exceeded the expected value:

look up library catalog titles

Survey is good to point toward the user oriented approach to design, but uses very few respondents.

Conclusion:

A. Most of what I found is a recapping of what is going on with little solid evaluation of users and uses of the information. It appears that it is still early in the game although the thesis work seems to point to a question as to whether or not this medium will have a long life.

B. In terms of my research question, I’m not sure that the duration of the phenomenon makes any difference. The information that is currently available is informational about a piece of time. Brewster Kahle points to how transient it is by saying that a URL lasts about 44 days. One common theme in library literature and articles about the community network is the user and basing building and judging on how the network or information affects the everyday life of the user and serves the information need of the user. Some point to the fact that collecting the content of the Internet is pointless if it does not have a historical and social context and that is where I think archives can excell in placing before future researches many pieces of information that will yield the specific and the historical and social context in which it fits.

C. I have a phenomenon to study, but I don’t yet have the narrowed interests to prepare a problem statement.

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