Going Digital: A Look at Assumptions Underlying Digital Libraries.

This article assesses certain assumptions that underlie digital library efforts. The authors believe that people's idealized view of what libraries have been, rather than what they actually are, has limited the digitization efforts. Since these limits come from the perception of the people about the problem expanding of the conception of digital libraries should serve to expand the scope and the utility of development efforts. The idealization of libraries is not so much wrong as incomplete--a simplified and simplistic image of the local and academic libraries most people have used throughout their lives. But failing to question this idealization or to acknowledge the ways in which the current conception of digital libraries is based on it, people risk creating digital libraries that are unnecessarily limited and entirely fanciful and unusable. The highest priority of a library, digital or otherwise, is to serve the research needs of its constituents. The development, maintenance and extension of its collection and its technologies must be supportive of this primary objective. Still, this priority may at times be lost in the midst of more immediate tasks. Among librarians, there is sometimes a tendency to focus on collection acquisition and maintenance and to lose sight of the library's role in supporting the community's research. a partial antidote to these tendencies is to take a work-oriented perspective which is to focus directly on the user community and to use ethnographic techniques to observe the work being done and the documents and technologies that support it.