Introduction

The following report is based on a series visit to the Department of Justice February 13-15th. During this visit several conversations took place between the researcher, librarians, and library clients within different sections of the Department of Justice and in several DOJ libraries. An initial draft of this report was then provided to the Department for feedback. This revised report briefly outlines the observations in each of these conversations. It attempts to highlight opportunities and provide an outsider’s reaction to these conversations given a very narrow window of engagement. The emphasis in all of this is on the ability/role of DOJ librarians to facilitate these conversations.

What emerged from the visit was the beginning of a planning process based on participatory librarianship and conversations. While the principles of participatory librarianship have been used to present an overall vision of library systems (Lankes et. al 2007), and to develop library software (Lankes, 2008) and services a clear method for planning and evaluating library services holistically has yet to be developed. While this case does not directly present such a methodology, it does point to one. From the case, one approach would be:
1. Identify major participatory communities within the service community
2. Identify and describe the major conversations within and across these communities
3. Identify the services and resources provided by the library to these conversations (later this needs to be refined into means of facilitation)
4. Look for gaps (where the library could, but is not providing facilitation), dead ends (where the library is providing a service not linked to conversations within a community), and opportunities (where the library could provide service to a community’s conversation, but is not).

In the case example below, three participatory conversations were identified. Within a key community (legal staff) a high-level conversation was identified (the “life of the law”). A basic mapping was done (figure 1). Also certain opportunities to provide better facilitation was identified (for example the “In Search Of” process for lawyers, and the extranet for the librarians themselves).

This initial approach was used as part of a strategic retreat process at a small academic library with some success. While clearly great specificity and data is needed to firm up this planning process, this case study serves as a first step.

Caveats and Limitations

Several caveats are important to note. Three days and a handful of focus groups are far from adequate to capture the richness of any organization. The best that can be hoped for are initial observations and to capture broad themes and ideas. While much of this report is written in an authoritative tone, i.e., making assertions and generalizations, that is simply a device to prompt further discussion. The idea is to prompt and provoke. This often leads to richer conversation than a more cautious and nuanced tone. So while there aren’t many “the research thinks” or “it might be” or “one would guess” like phrases within, they are implied.

The initial result of this visit was a chart of the “A Participatory View of the Department of Justice Libraries.” This chart seeks to capture the different conversations occurring from the library perspective. It is far from complete, but attempts to capture broad areas of understanding.

Participatory Communities

There appears to be four major participatory communities. These communities represent groups of people talking about similar things in similar fashions. They share processes and concerns. Certainly within the communities there are a lot of different voices with different roles (lawyers, managers, paralegals). Also, there are certainly communities not addressed in the visit (policy makers, IT, etc). Why bother talking about communities? Why not simply use the standard breakdown of library and patrons? Because, in a participatory approach, the library’s role is to facilitate conversations of communities – thus they must understand the dynamics of the communities themselves whether those interactions are with the library or not. Also, in any attempt to increase the quality of participation (conversations) within the communities, and thus improve the knowledge of these communities, one must respect the norms, cultures, and structures of these communities. Simply put, why would a lawyer want to participate in library systems when they are part of a different community all together? If libraries want to build effective conversations they must do so in as close alignment to communities as possible (including building systems within the communities rather than within the library).

For example within the legal staff, there is not much discussion or concern with how case files are managed. It seems that just about every lawyer keeps a set of files in a series of folders on their desktops. There is no standardized way of storing these data. Clearly how these files are stored is of great interest to librarians. From a library perspective, capturing this data, organizing it, and providing it back to customers is of high priority, but to the legal staff it is not. Thus, if a librarian were to attempt to capture this data to build new services they would find great resistance on the part of legal staff. Why? Because to the legal staff once all of this data is used to file a formal courts document (like a brief), the world of documents around that formal document becomes nearly irrelevant. If it is not in the brief, it is not important. If the library deems it important to capture and organize this information it does so by having a conversation internally to it’s own community. If it wants to get lawyers on board, it will have to make a strong case based on the norms and in the language of the legal staff.

In the site visit five communities became apparent:
1. Legal Staff: Lawyers and support staff are well versed in the formal conversations of the law. From formal filings to informal searching on databases, there is a high level understanding of a general process: understand the legislative intent of a given law; build a brief that captures both the facts and the theory of the case; and understand the life of the law including precedents, decisions, and related legislative action. The conversations of the legal staff are in many cases formal, and regulated. Not every case will include "Legislative Intent" formally. There are also many informal conversations happening between litigators.
2. DOJ Librarians: The librarians in the Department of Justice form a community that regularly exchange information, techniques and resources. However, while there is a clear desire to provide outstanding service, much of how this service should be delivered remains an open question. With little to no data on actual service utilization, service priorities and decisions are often based on individual success, anecdotes and personal philosophies. This makes it difficult to truly gauge the effectiveness of services.
3. Database Vendors: Hein, Westlaw, LexisNexis constitute the core databases for the legal profession and are clearly needed across the enterprise. However each section has its own key resources. There is great competition between these vendors with little information sharing.
4. Other Sources of Legal Information: This disparate group consists of other law libraries, legal research centers, other law firms and a wide variety of other players. There are some formal means of communications such as AALL, but there are also structural issues in creating formal connections (privacy of case matters, competitive advantage, proprietary information, and billing structures).
5. General Audiences: This is not a formal community by any means. Rather it is the open information environment that the Department of Justice exits within. It is constantly changing and has little coherence.

Within these communities there are opportunities for the library to improve service, and better facilitate knowledge building. Which, if any, of these opportunities the libraries pursue is a matter of internal priorities and resources, though a few recommendations are made.

It should also be noted that it is in the intersection of these communities, conversations across communities, that most of the opportunities for improved library service lay. Therefore in the discussion of the communities, special note shall be made of these cross-community collaborations.

Legal Staff (A Litigating Section)

There is an interesting dichotomy of knowledge creation and capture that occurs within litigating sections. On one hand there are very formal processes of documenting knowledge and conversations. Legal rules of disclosure, brief production and case filings force lawyers to make most knowledge explicit. On the other hand there is a much larger volume of information or “research” that is gathered and created in the process of brief development. Along the process of creating a brief there seems to be an accumulation of information until a “theory of the case” is developed. Once this is developed materials are loosely organized into folders and sub folders. Some of this material might make into an archiving process, but much remains in the heads of lawyers and other legal staff. It also seems that most information organization is case oriented. All data is gathered and associated with cases with little larger topical oriented organization.

It would appear there is a great need for an organizational system for lawyers to keep case oriented information, plus the rich world of research around a case. Right now librarians capture some of this in pathfinders and informal files on experts, but only when the legal staff comes to the library for information and assistance.

This is not to say that there aren’t some attempts at a more section-wide organization of cases and knowledge. One litigating section talked about their “ISO” process. ISO (“In Search Of”) is a means of section lawyers asking for information from others in their section. Throughout the day legal staff send requests for information (who has dealt with topic X, has anyone used X as an expert witness, etc) to a secretary. The secretary twice a day bundles up the requests and sends out a section-wide e-mail with the questions. Answers are then sent from legal staff to legal staff with no attempts to match questions with answers section-wide. Mid-level supervisors also serve as repositories of organizational knowledge/history. Another mechanism to share knowledge within a division is a “matter” database. This informal system attempts to capture cases and legal matters currently under consideration by a division.

The informality and patchwork nature of these section-wide conversations seems to be the result of several factors. The first is the need for confidentiality in the cases under consideration. Some cases and issues are too sensitive to be made known widely (indeed topics may not go beyond the lawyers directly involved in the topic). However, this need varies widely across section with many sections having virtually no such prohibitions. The other factor relates to the nature of the cases under consideration. Some sections work on a relatively small domain of issues where sharing information yields great dividends, whereas a section dealing with a wide variety of cases would find little overlap in lawyer knowledge.

Librarians as Investigators

It is worth noting an interesting idea that emerged in how some of the legal staff saw the role of librarians. Clearly librarians have gained great success in specializing in research concerning expert witnesses. Librarians also appear to have a great opportunity in situating themselves directly in to the legal process. Several times the idea of librarians working closely on a case, whether in terms of providing direct evidence or in aiding the development of case theory was mentioned. In these circumstances lawyers attributed the success of cases directly to the aid of library staff. In the case of anti-trust this even developed into real staff resources.

Of note was the idea of librarians as civil investigators was raised several times. Whereas in criminal cases DOJ provides investigatory staff or agents, in civil cases this is not always the case. Civil lawyers mentioned using librarians in this capacity to discover evidence and materials pertinent to the case. This seemed to go beyond expert witness research, and was seen as a much closer relationship between lawyer and librarian. It seems this kind of relationship is worth special scrutiny (and promotion) in any follow-up activity.

Recommendations

There is a great opportunity for the librarians in the department-wide case management initiative. While development and implementation of the electronic case management system may well be beyond the resources, expertise and authority of the DOJ libraries, they should be a part of the overall process. By having librarians “at the table” in the development of this system, the libraries can ensure a presence in the system likely to become the most used interface in the Department. Beyond this tactical concern, librarians have a great deal to offer system creators in terms of information management and reuse. By both better understanding the processes lawyers must use, being more visible to litigators in this process, and helping ensure good information practice, DOJ librarians can have a large and positive impact on the system. One approach might be to create an institutional repository that looked very much like a law review journal or some other format lawyers would use on a regular basis.

Such a system would also allow for new services to feedback into the legal community. For example, the “Brief Bank” currently offers exemplary briefs to lawyers. It would be interesting to analyze these briefs and feed back results to litigating sections. One could imagine a sort of reverse citation analysis where litigators get feedback on which items are cited the most in briefs (legal codes, cases, but more importantly, bodies of evidence and current thinking). Analyzing the information sources and people DOJ lawyers use might provide interesting data back to divisions. They could see what sources they depend on regularly, they could also detect any biases in sources, learn about new resources, and identify seminal cases in the making. This might be a good partnership with the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Such an initiative also very much aligns to the purpose of the Brief Bank itself. If DOJ is concerned with consistency in approach, policy and documentation, the library can provide a vital bibliographic check to wards this end.

DOJ Librarians

The DOJ librarians have an excellent reputation amongst the groups participating in the visit. They are proactive and engaged. They are also clearly dedicated to service. There are, however, three areas for improvement that stood out when looking at them as a group. Librarians appear to be: risk averse, manually oriented, and data poor. Once again, this is an aggregate view, with individual exceptions. Let us take each in turn.

By and large DOJ librarians are risk averse. This is a result of the Department of Justice culture and the very nature of he practice of law. It is natural and right for all members of a legal enterprise to be acutely concerned with disclosing too much information. Librarians naturally do not want to be the source of a leak, or to make their legal clients look bad, or be accused of undermining the core litigation activities. Far from being a negative, this shows keen understanding of the culture. However, it clearly creates some conflict between librarian principles of openness and the large DOJ culture. Librarians also seem to fail to take into account that the lawyers act as the gatekeepers and either makes the necessity of confidentiality clear to librarians, or they do not disclose confidential information in the first place. The result is that the librarians are very hesitant to share anything outside of the firewall, even when they have clear ability to do so. Currently librarians default to not sharing and going outside the firewall without formally examining the issues.

These issues have been brought up in terms of sharing legislative histories, but the more interesting case might be expert witness databases. DOJ librarians have been successful in building their reputations and utility by becoming master searchers in terms of expert witnesses. Librarians scour the web, databases and other information sources for an expert’s documents, thoughts and profile. The result is information that then goes to legal staff. However, experts are often used repeated times, or by multiple parties. One could imagine capturing all of these expert resources into a central repository for a section. A strategy might be the development of a very high-level expert database that does little more than identify an expert, a general area of expertise and a case they were associated with. This way a lawyer could quickly find out if an expert had been used before and by whom without risk of maintaining extensive files of citizens. However, librarians are wary to create such a database worried that it could be requested under FOIA and might reveal legal strategy. They may well be right, but has the question ever been formally asked? By defaulting to a “if in doubt, don’t” default position, the librarians may be holding back useful services unnecessarily.

The second characteristic found was a reliance on highly manual processes. This can be most clearly seen in terms of the DOJ Virtual Library and the pathfinders on the site. These pages are static, and require manual link checking, editing and updating. This results in a lot of extra labor in maintaining the site, and lost opportunities that a more sophisticated technical approach might bring (such as SDI-like services, or alerts on new/changed resources for interested parties). It is ironic that some of this manual processing stems from the departmental use of PHP. PHP is a web scripting language created for the explicit purpose of integrating dynamic elements into web pages. The root cause for this manual orientation seems to be a distrust of the IT staff and services. The IT infrastructure is seen as highly buttoned down and antithetical to innovation. This problem seems exacerbated by a near absence of a library IT authority and a previously failed attempt to build a custom acquisitions system. IT authority is not simply technical knowledge that is certainly present in the library, but the ability for the library staff to directly control the IT being used. This topic will be addressed more deeply in the recommendations.

The last characteristic of DOJ librarians worth note is the data poor environment they work in. This poverty does not relate to the data and information sources used in the practice of librarianship (databases, holdings, etc) which are vast – clearly DOJ librarians have done an excellent job at making a case for resources. Rather this refers to the evaluative data of service use itself. Use of data in terms of evaluation, utilization, even size of patron base simply is not part of the everyday workings of the librarians.

While there are many good reasons for this near absence of data (lack of time to gather statistics, absence of a circulation system, poor tools to track website usage), the end result is that discussions on service priorities come down to persuasiveness of personal arguments and reliance on authority. In other words, when deciding what services to enhance and which to cut, decisions are made by how well someone argues a position, not on actual use and projected impact of the services themselves. In a collegial environment like at DOJ libraries, these methods can work, but they can also cause friction and division in staff over time.

An example of how all three of these characteristics come into play can be seen in the current discussions around a new integrated library system. The two current ILS systems must be replaced. The question on the table is how to replace these systems. There is currently a perception that the technical service staff and the reference staff have different priorities in terms of replacing these systems. The reference staff sees a need for a different approach to holdings and feels the technical services staff is being too traditional. However, in conversations with the technical service side of the house, the exact same desires are put forth. No one sees an “off the shelf” ILS as ideal. They are cumbersome, lack innovation, are inherently not secure, and take a great amount of effort to maintain. The only thing that all agree on is the value of a very good acquisitions system because of the universally agreed upon value of efficiently and effectively licensing resources for the entire agency (not coincidently, the acquisitions service has the most data available in terms of usage, costs, and overall value to the agency).

In the debate on replacing the catalog, risk aversion, manual process, and data poverty are quickly apparent. There is a strong desire to buy an off the shelf solution by the technical staff. Not because these are seen necessarily as the best solutions, but off the shelf ILS solutions are the safest in terms of guaranteed delivery of functionality, support of the system, and experience. The technical staff was burned by trying to build custom solutions in the past, and that lesson still remains front and center in the consideration of a new system. In response to the universally perceived deficiencies with the current catalog solutions, librarians have been using very manual processes to make up the difference. The Virtual Library is very much a product of manual work arounds to an inadequate catalog. Yet, there is a real question as to the true value of the catalog in the first place. Without data on who is using the catalog, for what and how often, how can the group make a real plan? It would seem that the primary interface to DOJ holdings for lawyers are the reference librarians. Outside of a few notable exceptions, lawyers ask librarians for materials and don’t know or care if these resources come from a collection, inter-library loan, or in some cases, librarians using their own public library cards. By knowing the reality of who uses the catalog versus who uses the Virtual Library, one could decide where to invest resources. If the catalog is indeed used beyond librarians as an inventory system, then using resources to enhance the underlying ILS to be more portal like makes good sense. On the other hand, if it is primarily for librarians, buy the easiest to maintain with a good acquisitions module and be done with it.

Recommendations

One could make a whole host of recommendations to address some of the concerns. However, the fact is that there is a culture in the libraries, and that culture seems to by and large be working. The questions are not really how to make libraries less risk averse, nor is it how to gather more data on service utilization (that only helps if someone will attend to the data). What participatory librarianship tells us is that to further a conversation people must participate in something that has a useful context and meaning in their daily lives. So the point is to take something the community already considers important, and address issues in that context. The ILS makes an interesting starting context.

First take the areas there seems to be agreement upon. The new ILS must act more as a portal to a wide range of information beyond physical holdings. Patrons and librarians alike must be able to see a more holistic picture of the services and resources available. What’s more, such a system must provide robust backend systems for acquisitions. Further agreed upon is that current ILS systems are inadequate, or at the very least, represent the priorities of very different library types. Current ILS systems already present a security nightmare for the department and the librarians that have to certify and maintain them. Add to this the complexity of maintaining a full ILS system when only a fraction of current functionality is needed. Plus ILS vendors are busy adding new features in a proprietary manner that will be inapplicable to the DOJ setting, thus increasing the maintenance needs without increasing the functionality of the system.

The obvious alternative to purchasing an existing ILS is to build a custom solution meeting just the needs of DOJ, much as the first OPACs were developed by academic libraries dissatisfied with commercial alternatives. However, past experience has shown how difficult that proposition is (in terms of building custom software for DOJ, and in terms of building new library systems in general). There is a third option, and one that might work well for the DOJ setting. Since holdings information is not seen as sensitive data and can be made publically available (indeed it already is within WorldCat), one could see a hosted solution being utilized. This system would reside outside a firewall and simply be pointed to by DOJ. The acquisitions function could remain a separate function hosted within DOJ.

There do exist hosted systems worth looking into, the most notable being OCLC’s WorldCat Local. Other possibilities would be to externally host an open source ILS such as Evergreen or Koha. However, once the idea of hosting a system externally becomes viable, the possible benefits and nature of the system become much more interesting. Interesting particularly in terms of addressing questions of risk aversion, manual labor, and data poverty.

What if the librarians evaluated all of their resources in terms of what could be externally hosted? What portions of the Virtual Library, digitized legislative histories, pathfinders, whatever, could safely sit outside of the DOJ firewall? This would be done in conjunction with clearance officers to make policy and boundaries clear lowering the risk librarians feel they are taking by sharing information.

Once a sizable external collection can be created in terms of information resources, the infrastructure used to host this library extranet becomes wide open, outside the purview of DOJ IT allowing the libraries to utilize their own IT skills. With the raft of hosted web solutions available, DOJ librarians could create sophisticated, and interactive systems (RSS feeds, blogs, streamed instruction, multimedia pathfinders, shared bookmarks, group WIKIs) without the constraints of firewall level lock down. With today’s widely available hosted solutions, and open source software, librarians can now build sophisticated web tools with minimal technical knowledge, thus mitigating the issues of manual tool building and maintenance. Further, such tools can have built in tracking and statistical systems (such as Google Analytics) that will provide rich data on actual use.

These rich reference tools can then be combined with the hosted catalog to create a very useful portal system for DOJ staff. Further, given that these resources are already cleared for public consumption, the DOJ libraries can reap the added benefits of better serving tax payers, and be seen by peer institutions as taking a leadership role.

Imagine the Department of Justice Extranet. A web accessible service contributed to and used by law libraries across the country. An extranet is an internally focused web presence hosted outside of the organization itself. Like an “intranet” hosted beyond the firewall. A DOJ lawyer could get onto the site, quickly search across catalog, pathfinders, and database locator materials (and using technologies like Open URL, perhaps licensed resources) from inside or outside of the firewall. The same lawyer could set up an alert system so they will be notified by e-mail, or RSS feed of new materials in their area of practice. Furthermore, law libraries from across the country could add their own pathfinders and materials since they too can benefit from sophisticated hosted solutions outside of their own firewalls. They might also add their holdings information to a true union legal catalog.

Aside from the obvious service benefits of the extranet to the DOJ lawyers and librarians, DOJ libraries take a highly visible leadership position in the legal community. It could also be spun into a great give back to taxpayers and help address the department’s reputation for secrecy. The project also creates a new continuing innovation opportunity for DOJ librarians. The site can be a testbed for new services, and help teach librarians about new technologies. These technologies may not be directly implemented in the extranet, but would still have utility.

Take, for example, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. While it is highly doubtful that DOJ law libraries would build and run a successful social networking site for DOJ lawyers (they don’t have the time, the confidentiality of their work precludes participation, etc), by learning how such sites work, DOJ librarians can enhance their expert witness searching repertoire, and teach lawyers how information from such sites can be gathered for use in briefs. The system becomes a context for continuing education. More on this concept will be detailed in “Key Recommendations” later.

Database Vendors

Another obvious community that DOJ librarians must be aware of is the loose collection of vendors that create, combine and sell licensed resources such as databases to DOJ. There is fierce competition among these vendors and little in terms of cooperation. The nature of this community makes it difficult for easy integration of these resources into any portal solution, and will necessitate the continued role of librarians in navigating these resources on behalf of the legal staff. However, with the obvious buying power of DOJ, and the ability to bring attention to issues in legal information, there may be levers DOJ libraries can use to prompt vendors to aid DOJ libraries in their work.

Recommendations

The first thing DOJ libraries should do is press database vendors to provide better and more regular statistics in terms of resource use. While “pay for use” databases provide clear data, flat fee databases do not necessarily provide common and comparable statistics.
It would also be useful to include database vendors in the discussion of the extranet. By allowing vendors to participate in the project, they will gain attention, and have the ability to develop general purpose tools (such as OpenURL resolvers, web services, XML-layer exchanges) that they can use to enhance their own product offerings.

Other Sources of Legal Information

There are many sources of legal information beyond the Department of Justice and the database vendors. Courts, state agencies, and university law libraries are only a few examples. These examples tend to have well-established communities unto themselves and are easily discoverable. However there are a host of less formal legal sources, many commercial, that seem to be of value to DOJ librarians in their daily work. In fact, a great deal of effort seems to be spent in locating and evaluating these disparate legal sources.

Recommendations

It would be worth keeping track of which external legal sources are referred to, and how often. Beyond interlibrary loan requests, how often do librarians seek out these sources on behalf of legal staff? Such work is the basis of pathfinder development, but more formal examination of these sources may yield interesting patterns of use. Such patterns would be helpful in an extranet project. In this context such sites could be described and included, and also invited to directly contribute information and data once vetted by library staff.

General Audiences

This very broad category is a very loose community that in reality constitutes the open web and the various disciplines that DOJ staff draw information from. It is only seen as a coherent community in that major trends, fads and technologies emerge in this space that impact the DOJ. One need look no further than the rise of large-scale digitization efforts such as Google books. Such a project creates new resources for the DOJ to use, but it also creates impressions on the part of some DOJ staff that libraries are becoming less relevant. Such notions are based on a fundamental misperception of what a library is. On several occasions lawyers raised the idea that libraries are less useful, because of increasingly available digital information, and the redundancy of print materials. Such cases stood out and the individuals discussed are exceptions, but it does raise the question of how prevalent is this idea beyond the core patrons the library has won over. This of course goes back to issues of measurement data in terms of patron use of resources and how wide the libraries user base truly is within the DOJ.

Recommendations

The bottom line is that DOJ libraries are not immune from pressures, misperceptions and fads promulgated on the open Internet. By knowing its constituency well, and be seeing as a player on the open web, the DOJ libraries have an excellent opportunity to proactively address and shape these pressures.

Key Recommendations

This report made several recommendations. Some are very straightforward: develop and track more usage data to better aim services and inform decision making of DOJ librarians. This includes on DOJ library services (such as reference, Virtual Library usage, catalog usage), as well as external resources usage like use of vendor databases. The other recommendations are more ambitious.

DOJ librarians should look to support informal information networks within the litigating divisions. Replicating the success of the ISO (“In Search Of”) e-mails and matter databases across litigating divisions cam make lawyers more successful, and will allow librarians to support and insinuate themselves into these networks to provide better service.

Certainly a much more ambitious project would be to address the need for better case management and knowledge management by lawyers in the litigating sections. Such a system must take into consideration that lawyers often do not realize the utility of research that does not make it into formal briefs, and should be made easy for them to use. Rather than building this institutional repository as a sort of “bit bucket” where documents are accessible by author and/or date, the library should look to the format and norms of law journals. Lawyers understand the format, organization and importance of these document types.

Perhaps the recommendation with the greatest opportunity for immediate impact and service improvement would be the creation of an extranet. By creating an externally hosted, and cooperative virtual library with DOJ legal resources and pathfinders (those clearly approved for public consumption) the libraries can raise their visibility, provide more innovative services to their clients, and gain an invaluable testbed for their librarians. The next section will detail a proposed process for such an initiative.

Building the DOJ Extranet

A librarian logs into a hosted site outside of the DOJ firewall. They quickly scan any broken or updated links they are responsible for. By correcting a link, it is instantly corrected in every page using that resource. The librarian can then review any outstanding questions posed by the network of law librarians around the country. The librarian can also quickly see any answers for questions s/he has posed. After a quick read of announcements, s/he uses point and click tools to put together a pathfinder on recent legislation. The pathfinder links to public data, a new online legislative history, and links to proprietary information that only patrons with licenses will be able to see. Once the pathfinder is done, s/he logs into the DOJ library blog and writes a quick post on the new resource that is put on the home page as well disseminated via and RSS feed. Finally the librarian checks in on her online class she is taking on ethics and anti-trust.

A few moments later, a DOJ lawyer receives an email alert that a new pathfinder in his/her area is available. The lawyer brings up the new pathfinder, and clicks through to a pre-formulated Westlaw query. Westlaw automatically detects the lawyer is within DOJ’s firewall and executes the query seamlessly (had the lawyer been at home s/he would have been prompted for a password). Finding some relevant additional sources, the lawyer sends an email to his/her librarian where an ILL request will be done.

The preceding scenario is within reach of the DOJ. Using open source software, existing web services, and minor development effort, such a system can be put in place without substantial investment into custom software development. Further, such a system can be built in conjunction with a number of high profile partners. What is required: an organizational effort on the part of DOJ libraries, an experimental philosophy, and some resource investment.

The necessary components of such a system would be a hosted open source infrastructure outside of the DOJ firewall. A university would be in ideal home for such as system, but AALL might also provide a home, or some other non-commercial, non-advocacy institution. In any case it would require a supported piece of hardware with adequate bandwidth and backups.

The DOJ libraries would need to review their existing Virtual Library for a substantial base of resources that could initially populate the public site. Significant work would also need to go into specifying and implementing a hosted inventory/catalog system for the DOJ collections.

The whole project would be presented as an ongoing experiment, seeking reliable service, but stressing innovation over fortification (key documents and resources could be duplicated as static files within the DOJ for unexpected downtime). Once this initial base of resources and infrastructure is in place, partners should be sought out to be part of the experiment. States, universities and other non-commercial legal entities could be prioritized, with vendors being invited to develop new products to enhance and integrate with the public site (much like PubMed).

In order to explore the possibility of the extranet, a few initial steps should be taken:

1. Technical Readiness: in most cases technology should follow needs assessment and concrete planning. However, in the DOJ case, librarians need a better sense of what technical capabilities exists in the open web environment as a means of stimulating their brainstorming and thinking. Technical readiness will both expose librarians to the possibilities of new technologies as well as establishing their confidence in using and incorporating these technologies. They need to be more at ease with technology development. This could be done online, but perhaps a series of intensive one-day hands on workshops would be a better idea. In these workshops they would build technologically enabled pathfinders, blogs, and full-blown sites increasing their confidence.
2. Brainstorming: after technical readiness, librarians can spend time thinking about conversations going on within the library (and externally where applicable), and come up with a vision and mission for the extranet.
3. Inventory and Policy Making: With vision in hand librarians can scour the existing Virtual Library and other library resources to determine what can and cannot reside outside the firewall. In parallel work needs to begin on implementing a hosted solution for DOJ holdings.
4. Experimentation: With a mission in place a project team can begin work with an external partner or partners on developing functional prototypes of the extranet. These implementations should show the advantages and disadvantages of a hosted open approach. It will also give library staff and clients real systems to react to.
5. Implementation: Once prototyping determine the base line of the extranet DOJ and partners can go about building and previewing the system. Librarians should be an integral part of the building process, not simply clients consuming someone else’s work. They should be given time to work as part of the development team.
6. Ongoing Education: once the system is in place, librarians exploring new or existing technologies and service models can learn and build within the extranet.
7.
While the priorities and realities of the DOJ will dictate the actual timeline, the above steps could be accomplished in 12-18 months.

Conclusions

The Department of Justice clearly enjoys great library service. The librarians are skilled, dedicated, and clearly committed. However, they are also constrained in their abilities to innovate by a chasm between the services they provide and the tools to provide them. Good librarians, no matter their titles, are tool builders. Pathfinders, ILS’s, databases, even standing files are tools. The current IT environment makes it difficult for librarians to build effective tools. This, more than an environment of confidentiality, is holding the libraries back from innovation. To this point, it is the librarians themselves that sense this frustration, and they have been able to shield lawyers from this reality through a lot of manual effort.

The good news is that in participatory library terms, DOJ libraries are exemplars. They have a strong understanding of the communities they serve, and are facilitating them and improving them. However, it is difficult without better evaluative data to say how far that support extends within the DOJ organization. If DOJ does nothing more than documenting its successes it is in excellent position. However, if it wants to continue to be a leader, and be seen in that leadership role beyond DOJ, it must come to terms with the technical tools available to it. By using hosted solutions in the guise of an extranet, it can provide better service to its clients, solve its immediate ILS problem, feed into the current library staff’s thirst for innovation, and position itself in the larger Legal information community.
References
Lankes, R. David, Silverstein, J. L., Nicholson, S. (December, 2007). “Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation.” Information Technology and Libraries (4).
Lankes, R. David (January, 2008). "Scapes" OCLC Symposium on Reference and Social Networking, Philadelphia, PA. Available at http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/blog/?p=459

Jack M. Maness
Assistant Professor
Engineering Librarian
University Libraries
University of Colorado at Boulder
1720 Pleasant St.
184 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
jack.maness@colorado.edu

Abstract

This paper suggests the literature of “Social Presence” could provide a theoretical paradigm for the evaluation of social software and related technologies in libraries’ online public access catalogs (OPACs). Social Presence is a well-researched term in communication and education, and it has been demonstrated that a high degree of Social Presence facilitates online communication and learning. A review of the relevant literature, a potential model for understanding the OPAC as a “participatory catalog,” and suggestions for future research are given.

Background
There is currently in libraries a discussion about the next generation of web-based services, including OPACs. In its beginnings, much of this discussion revolved around the term “Library 2.0,” a term that is defined in many ways, some of them contradictory (Crawford, 2005; Maness, 2006). Recently, a more specific, concerted, and perhaps objective effort to coalesce the discussion has emerged from a partnership between the Information Institute of Syracuse and the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. This effort suggests “Conversation Theory,” which ostensibly posits that learning is achieved primarily through conversation, provides an underpinning for this next-generation web-based library system, or the “participatory library.” Participatory libraries allow users to have conversations with one another, with librarians, and with library systems in order to retrieve information and create new knowledge (Lankes & Silverstein, 2006).

The “participatory librarian” understands that the current state of the OPAC is inadequate in this regard, that they “provide minimal opportunities to the receiver of the information to provide feedback or input,” and that the “participatory catalog” requires the profession “rethink the catalog as a dynamic system, with data of varying levels of currency and, frankly, quality, coming into and out of the system” (Lankes & Silverstein, 2006: p. 5-6). The current generation of OPACs act as monologues, limiting conversation and thereby the creation of knowledge. Participatory OPACs, however, facilitate both conversation and knowledge creation.

But conversation requires conversants, of course, and in computer-mediated environments the presence of others is not always as apparent as it is in face-to-face settings. This paper suggests the literature of “Social Presence” can be used to assess the awareness users have of one another through OPACs enhanced with social software, thereby helping to facilitate conversation, information transfer, and knowledge discovery. Social Presence can compliment and undergird Conversation Theory and help build not only the next generation of OPACs, but the theoretical underpinnings to the participatory library itself.

Social Presence Online

The seminal work that introduced “Social Presence” to the lexicon is The Social Psychology of Telecommunications by Short, et. al. (1976). This work defined the term as “[t]he degree of salience of another person in an interaction and the consequent salience of an interpersonal relationship” (65). The authors emphasized that Social Presence is “a quality of the communications medium itself,” and hypothesized that “communications media vary in their degree of Social Presence, and that these variations are important in determining how individuals act” (65). They concluded that face-to-face was the most socially-present media, followed by video second and audio recordings third, but it has been suggested since that these findings cannot necessarily be generalized to online interactions (Tu, 2002b). Summarily, Social Presence is here explored as the degree to which one is aware of others in computer-mediated environments, an awareness that affects their behavior and their perception of other people, their relationship to them, and of the media itself.

Short et. al. (1976) also discussed how the degree of Social Presence of a communications medium can be measured, using gradient continuums such as personal-impersonal, sociable-unsociable, sensitive-insensitive, cold-warm, and others, all of which may be better understood to fall under two broader measures of Social Presence: immediacy (how aware a user is of others) and intimacy (how positively that user perceives that awareness) (Tu & McIsacc, 2002a). Social Presence, then, is a complex qualitative judgment one makes of the relative immediacy and intimacy of an interpersonal relationship perceived through the lens of a communication medium, and this judgment helps inform one on the appropriate behaviors for that medium and that relationship.

There is, however, no common way of quantifying Social Presence, and Tu (2002b) has further suggested that “[c]urrent instruments are unable to measure the complicated issue of online Social Presence” (34). Most studies of online Social Presence utilize surveys designed to determine subjects’ perceptions of the social interactions within mediated environments along the basic matrices suggested by Short, et. al. (1976), but do not address many other factors shown to affect users’ behavior in computer-mediated environments (Tu, 2000). There have in recent years been two instruments that demonstrated construct and content validity, one provided by Kreijns, et. al. (2004), the other by Tu (2002b), and these may be instrumental first-steps in better understanding Social Presence in CMC.

Despite difficulties in measuring Social Presence, the implications of Social Presence studies for online learning are great and duly noted in the educational literature. Tu (1999) builds a theoretical history for Social Presence relevancy in education, using Albert Bandura’s (1997) well-known Social Learning Theory as a basis by which to reconstruct Social Presence theory for instructional settings utilizing CMC as their primary means of teaching and learning. Many studies corroborate the hypothesis that positive Social Presence measures indicate student satisfaction with instruction and instructors in virtual environments (Dirkin, et. al., 2005; Gunawardena, 1995; Leh, 2001; Polhemus, 1995; Richardson & Swan, 2003; Rovai, 2002; Swan, 2002) and perceived learning (Richardson & Swan, 2003; Swan, 2002). However, Picciano (2002) was unable to find Social Presence and interaction to be a consistent indicator of student performance, but did conclude that “how interaction affects learning outcomes and what are the relationships between the two is a complex pedagogical phenomenon in need of further study” (33). Ultimately, however it is defined or measured, Social Presence does appear to be strongly indicative of effective communication and learning online, and yet intricately related to many factors and variables, including privacy (Tu, 2002a).

Interestingly, the concept of Social Presence has also expanded beyond CMC and educational settings to the realm of human-computer interaction (HCI). In two publications, Kumar and Benbasat (2002a; 2002b) define and outline a model for Para-Social Presence (PSP), wherein they “make a case for treating a web site as a valid social actor and argue that the relationship between a web site and her visitors should be characterized in much the same way one would characterize an inter-personal relationship” (2002a: 5). In this sense, the relationship of Social Presence and PSP to libraries is complicated perception of the interactions among individuals and the web-resources they utilize.

The Participatory OPAC

It is possible that the literature of Social Presence can inform how libraries evaluate OPACs as they begin to become more participatory. It is not necessarily so, as OPACs are not the sort of learning systems that the educational literature has investigated in this regard, but Social Presence at least provides a justification for and mechanism by which social software applications in OPACs can be evaluated. There is also some reason to believe users are coming to expect OPACs to be more participatory (Ballas, 2006).

Assuming Social Presence is a desirable aspect to an OPAC, a simple model can be given that illustrates the difference between the traditional, information-retrieval model for OPACs and the Participatory OPAC. It is technologically agnostic, endorsing no particular tool, product, or vendor. Rather, it is prescriptive and general, suggesting that librarians abandon the “database” or “information search-and-retrieve” model of providing resources (Fig. 1), which emphasize resources, and begin recasting their web-services as participatory networking sites, which emphasize both resources and the social interrelationships necessary to make them valuable (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1: OPAC as database

Fig. 1 depicts the traditional OPAC. It simply provides an interface to a database that contains information “objects” (which can be records for books or serials, databases or web sites, anything that can be considered a unit of information). The user’s participation is very minimal, and the OPACs participation is passive and homogenous; it can really only do one thing—retrieve objects whose description meets the user’s search criteria. It is hard to imagine Social Presence measures, and perhaps even PSP measures, amounting to any significance in this database-driven OPAC.

In Fig. 2 the participatory model is depicted, wherein a user interacts with a library system that provides access to resources, other users through social software (such as chat boxes or group resources based on user profiles), librarians through components such as virtual reference boxes, and other networks, all of which, in turn, provide access to more users, resources, and networks. Action is initiated by both the user and the library system (system can alert user to new resources, messages from other users, or assistance from librarians), and methods of accessing resources are exponentially increased. The result is a more dynamic, interactive, enhanced tool for information transfer, all determined by the degree to which the user is aware of others’ presences in the networked environment.
Fig. 2: OPAC as network

Moving from the database model to the network model will greatly improve Social Presence aspects of OPACs. Users will be aware of one another’s presences on the site, as well as the presence of librarians. Users will create new or connect previously existing networks and communicate either synchronously or asynchronously to share and create resources for their communities. Librarians will recommend resources and search strategies, and the OPAC itself will do the same. These Participatory OPACs will ostensibly do in the online library what they have done in physical libraries for centuries: share resources and knowledge. The user will experience a much higher degree of Social Presence and PSP, and information transfer will be significantly improved because the entire “social life of information” will be present in one environment; users will not only discover, but share, evaluate, and utilize information (Brown & Duguid, 2000).

Yet there is a great deal to be investigated in this model. Different users would utilize different components of such a system very differently. Cataloging practices could face dramatic change. Issues of intellectual property, privacy, and intellectual freedom abound. But if the work of others on Social Presence in education and communication is any indication, the use of social software and augmentation of Social Presence and PSP in library services is possible and could herald a revolutionary improvement in the history of library services. Services will join collections online, and a true “virtual” library will be possible.

Future Research
A research agenda for understanding the benefits of a Participatory OPAC can be understood as a three-dimensional matrix of variables, the investigator choosing among them and designing a study to understand the specific combination. If the agenda is visualized as a cube, the investigator determines a smaller cube within the larger one to investigate (Fig. 3). For instance, a researcher might consider if the use of wikis by undergraduate engineering students increases their perception of how personal the OPAC is, or how the use of a blog in government publications research group creates a sense of immediacy among faculty versus students in economics. A nearly infinite number of combined investigation is possible, a critical mass of which would greatly benefit libraries in their particular investments and deployments of social software technologies.

Fig. 3: A research model for the Participatory OPAC

It is rather inevitable that different users will utilize the same technologies in different ways, or will perceive the PSP of them differently, and allowances must be made for this array of possibility. In some cases, Social Presence can be perceived as an undesirable quality to a mediated environment. Participatory OPACs, then, must be customizable virtual spaces where users opt in or out of various social software services, personalizing their library interface to their needs.

Conclusion
Libraries have readily adopted the use of the Web in a noteworthy and largely successful attempt to deliver their content and collections in a more user-centered medium. But to date the delivery of library services have not been as readily provided via the same medium, creating a dissonance in library services that must be rectified. Social software intimates a possible rectification, and libraries have already begun adopting them in disconnected and experimental ways. But by integrating these sorts of social software into OPACs, the true value of them may be realized.
A potential theory for understanding and evaluating the use of such technologies in libraries is “Social Presence,” a term that has enjoyed a wealth of investigation in communication and education communities. Their findings that a person’s awareness and perception of other people in online environments impacts their behavior and their perception of the medium itself, could assist librarians and information professionals in providing online services. Another valuable concept in this regard is “para-Social Presence,” a theory wherein a website is considered a social entity that interacts with its users much in the same way that Social Presence research finds in person-to-person interactions.

Libraries, using Social Presence and PSP as a philosophical paradigm, should begin building, framing, and perceiving their OPACs as participatory networks, websites that allow users to access not only resources, but one another. As libraries research, design, and provide personalized online systems that provide improved Social Presence and PSP, they will become more valuable in a world where information is sought, evaluated and used not only in communities, but in online communities. The “virtual library” will have come of age.

References
Balas, J. L. (2006). The social ties that bind. Computers in Libraries, 26(2), 39-41.
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Brown, J. & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Crawford, Walt. (2006). Library 2.0 and 'Library 2.0.' Cites and Insights, 6, 2. Accessed June 10, 2006, from http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ6i2.pdf
Dirkin, K. H., Mishra, P., & Altermatt, E. (2005). All or nothing: levels of sociability of a pedagogical software agent and its impact on student perceptions and learning. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 14(2), 113(15).
Gunawardena, C. (1995). Social Presence theory and implications for interaction and collaborative learning in computer conferences. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications 1(2/3): 147:166.
Harder, G. (2006). Connecting the dots: social software and the social nature of libraries. Feliciter, 52(2), 54-56.
Kreijns, K., Kirschner, P. A., Jochems, W., & van Buuren, H. (2004). Determining sociability, social space, and Social Presence in (a)synchronous collaborative groups. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(2), 155(18).
Kumar, N., & Benbasat, I. (2002a). Para-Social Presence and communication capabilities of a web site: A theoretical perspective. E-Service Journal, 1(3), 5.
Kumar, N., & Benbasat, I. (2002b). Para-Social Presence: A re-conceptualization of ‘Social Presence’ to capture the relationship between a web site and her visitors. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Science.
Lankes, R. & Silverstein, J. (2006). Participatory networks: The library as conversation (draft). Accessed January 5, 2006 from http://iis.syr.edu/projects/PNOpen/ConversationFirstDraft.pdf
Leh , A. S. C. (2001). Computer-mediated communication and Social Presence in a distance learning environment. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 7(2), 109.
Maness, J. M. (2006). Library 2.0 theory: web 2.0 and its implications for libraries. Webology, 3(2). Accessed January 5, 2006 from http://www.webology.ir/2006/v3n2/a25.html.
Picciano, A. G. (2002). Beyond student perceptions: Issues of interaction, presence, and performance in an online course. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 6(1), 21.
Polhemus, L., Shih, L., Swan, K., & Richardson, J. (2000). Building affective learning community: Social Presence and learning engagement. AACE Proceedings of 2000, 800-802.
Richardson, J. C., & Swan, K. (2003). Examining Social Presence in online courses in relation to students' perceived learning and satisfaction. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 7(1), 68.
Rovai, A. P. (2002). Sense of community, perceived cognitive learning, and persistence in asynchronous learning networks. The Internet and Higher Education, 5(4), 319-332.
Sallnas, E. (2005). Effects of communication mode on Social Presence, virtual presence, and performance in collaborative virtual environments. Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 14(4), 434(16).
Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications. New York: Wiley.
Tu, C. (1999). Reconstructing the social learning theory: Social Presence theory in online learning. AACE Proceedings of 1999, 1082-1087.
Tu, C. (2000). Critical examination of factors affecting interaction on CMC. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 23(1): 39-58.
Tu, C. (2002a). The relationship between Social Presence and online privacy. The Internet and Higher Education, 5(4), 293(26).
Tu, C. (2002b). The measurement of Social Presence in an online learning environment. International Journal on E-Learning, 1(2), 34-45.
Tu, C., & McIsaac, M. (2002). The relationship of Social Presence and interaction in online classes. The American Journal of Distance Education, 16(3), 131(20).

Take a moment and think about how the average patron might use technology. Not necessarily in a library, just in the everyday business of normal life.

Just using the web, patrons can send and receive email, read the news, visit their favorite social networking sites, plan trips, get directions, share themselves through writing, apply for jobs, attend classes on a variety of topics through a variety of educational outlets (academic and otherwise), chat, date, shop, call friends and relatives in other countries through Voice over IP (VoIP) programs, read or listen to books, download and listen to music, romp around virtual worlds, watch movies, research consumer purchases, pay bills and balance checkbooks. And that's just a *sampling* of what is available. Through various mobile devices, from laptops to mobile phones, patrons can carry many of these activities with them, from work, to the coffee shop, to the supermarket, to even the library.

What does any of this have to do with the library? Everything, really. In January 2000, David Pogue wrote a New York Times review (http://urltea.com/2plf ) of Lawrence Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which predicted that the Internet would be a Wild West where programmers would be sheriffs, and their word would be law. Pogue concluded the review with the comment that "if you don't like the Internet's system, you can always flip off the modem." In the preface to his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig quotes this line of Pogue's review, then argues that the purpose of his book Free Culture is to rebuke Pogue's 1999 statement, to argue that the online world has "fundamentally affected 'people who aren't online,'" and that "there is no switch that will insulate us from the Internet's effect."

Librarians cannot afford to flip the modem switch off. Librarians need to realize that the knowledge and implementation of user-centric technology is not optional; it is a pillar of library infrastructure. Technology education components of Library and Information Science programs need to be developed and improved to provide the crucial training to prepare librarians for success and innovation, and to provide excellent services that match patron needs.

A key starting point in technology education improvement is library school candidate recruitment. Library schools simply need to be more selective. Standard admission requirements should include:

• Knowledge of computer use, the Internet, and document and presentation computer applications, and proof of computer classes taken should earn bonus points. These are the basic tools of our trade, and since a decent percentage of librarians are career changers, this shouldn't be a difficult requirement to meet.

• A customer service personality with innate problem solving skills is a must, as proven by a thorough interview process. These characteristics are just as necessary when using technology as they are when working over a reference question. Too many people think that librarianship is sitting behind a desk reading all day, and library schools need to weed those applicants out.

• Project management experience would be a plus as a valuable skill that can be applied to everything from programs to technology to staff management.

There needs to be recognition that the days when the once-sufficient "I love books and reading" statement are behind us. Books are not the only services that libraries offer to communities, and a librarian, as a point-of-service provider, should be able to help anyone with any of the tools provided in the library environment, and accessible from home. New blood is a key element to infusing the profession with librarians who understand how to transfer their skills to all aspects of their customer-centric position, including the technology component.

Library school curricula need to change so that instead of constantly struggling to catch up with technology trends and innovations, librarians can stay on the bleeding edge, and even innovate in the field. My dream lineup of required classes would include local technology and new media specialists as adjunct instructors, including courses such as:

• Technology 101: Overview of how technology fits into library infrastructure, as well as basic computer, network, Internet structure & troubleshooting, with a lesson teaching component to help students learn to help people using public terminals (a prerequisite to graduation).

• Human Computer Interaction: Basic elements of user-centered design, user behavior, computer development history, quality assurance, user surveying, and usability, to help librarians understand technology from the user perspective.

• Technology Planning & Management: After taking a general management class (which should also really be required), this course would cover how to create a plan for any type of technology implementation in the library -- from full-scale public workstations to smaller projects like using Flickr, Facebook, or other online services at the library -- as well as long-term management of said plans and technologies.

• Marketing Online: How to launch a new online service, create and sustain visibility, cross-marketing opportunities, up-selling services, understand how patrons find and stay with new services, and dealing with changing, moving, or discontinuing a service.

• Technology Labs: Lab sessions (perhaps every other week of every semester) to learn about technology as it emerges and evolves, especially from the user perspective and approach, and to supplement the work in other technology track courses.

In my experience, these are all basic skills that are lacking in librarianship today, even with recent graduates, unless those graduates came from the technology field. Going forward, these are skills that cannot be ignored in an age where we offer home access to online databases, in-library access to a variety of services, and work in an industry where a technology or systems librarian, or technical support specialist, aren't always considered staff necessities.

The same way that technology doesn't stop changing, librarian education should not stop at graduation. While many schools offer continuing education workshops and online courses, the one-shot model isn't sufficient to keep us on our toes. I would like to see:

• Local alumni technology discussion groups who invite technology and new media specialists to speak.

• More news of innovative technologies (as well as other library programs and services) from alumni, to encourage innovation among alumni newsletter and website readers.

• Announcements of other workshops, webinars, local and online resources, especially events that are free or inexpensive, as an information service.

Alumni organizations shouldn't just serve as employment networking and fundraising pools. If library schools offered education that really continues to edify, beyond the one-shot-low-retention model, alumni satisfaction would increase which would lead increased alumni involvement in the alma mater, so everyone wins.

Technology waits for no one. Library and Information Science programs: seize the opportunity to help librarianship do more than just catch up. Help us innovate forward.

Abstract: Conversations are proposed as a useful lens through which to consider the creation of knowledge and, by extension, the organization of that knowledge. Given a Web environment pervaded by conversational forms – social tagging systems, blogs, and wikis – the collaborative organization of resources warrants further exploration and analysis. Knowledge organization systems that result from mass collaboration are considered for their potential to augment library practice.

1. Conversations and Knowledge Creation
Investigations into the theory and practice of knowledge organization must ultimately engage with questions surrounding the nature and creation of knowledge. The discipline of information science has largely moved away from “information-as-brick” models, where messages can be transmitted from sender to receiver without loss of meaning. Rather, the nature of knowledge is increasingly viewed as an iterative process, with each individual attempting to make sense of the world s/he encounters (Dervin and Nilan, 1986). Such attempts result in cognitive changes for the individual, creating a contextual, personal meaning.

Various philosophies and theories have endeavored to address the nature of knowledge and knowledge creation. In an analysis of information science metatheories, Talja, Tuominen, and Savolainen (2005) draw distinctions between three broad approaches: constructivism, collectivism, and constructionism. The approaches differ on several epistemological points, but can be distinguished largely based on the role played by language. The constructionist model, in particular, characterizes knowledge as being “produced from limited viewpoints as parts of ongoing conversations” (Talja, Tuominen, & Savolainen, 2005, 90).

Outside the field of information science, and seemingly aligned with the tenets of constructionism, Conversation Theory (Pask, 1975) identifies conversational exchanges as the basis of learning and knowledge construction. While developed to model cognitive processes for machine learning, Conversation Theory also operates at a broader conceptual level: “for Pask, anything that can be sensibly said about ‘conversation’ is part of [Conversation Theory]” (Scott, 2001, 346). Such broad applicability is likely a result of Pask’s background in cybernetics, and Conversation Theory has been described as having the “aim of unifying theories and concepts across disciplines” (Scott, 2001, 346). [1]

At its core, the framework of Conversation Theory centers on participants communicating and seeking a shared agreement, or mutual understanding. Pask’s understandings are specific to the conversation participants, as well as for the given domain and topic (Pask, 1975, 49). As a result “correctness” is relative to the participants and not measured against some external absolute (Pask, 1975, 120). Conversation Theory fundamentally treats knowledge creation “as a process of knowing and coming to know” (Scott, 2001, 348).

Given the nature of knowledge and knowledge creation afforded by Conversation Theory, this paper employs the notion of conversations as a lens through which to consider knowledge organization. Building on the participatory paradigm introduced by Lankes, et al. (2007), this paper explores the knowledge organization practices emerging in online collaborative environments. This paper will also consider the potential utility of mass-collaboration knowledge organization for library systems, with particular reference to recent developments at the Library of Congress.

2. Knowledge Organization Practices and Possibilities
Methods for organizing knowledge have a considerable history in libraries and other information environments. These methods have long been the purview of a relatively small number of individuals, with trained professionals typical in 20th-century libraries. LIS scholarship has become increasingly attuned to the limitations of these traditional knowledge-organization practices. Svenonius (1992) summarized the criticisms “leveled at the procrustean structures of our great monolithic classifications,” noting “their rigidity in the face of change, the limited linearity of their relationships and their difficulty keeping pace with the dynamic and kaleidoscopic world of knowledge” (10). Similarly problematic is the bias embodied in controlled vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings; the critiques against its representation of marginalized peoples span over 30 years (cf. Berman, 1971, and Olson, 2002). It would seem that knowledge organization theory and praxis must find a way to evolve and overcome the shortcomings inherent in a past dominated by imposed deterministic hierarchy.

The treatment of information resources in the legacy LIS paradigm is also problematic. Typically, information resources are assigned a handful of subject representations, in the form of subject headings and classification designations. Despite such subject indexing being performed by professionals, these representations are inevitably limited to one individual’s perceptions of an information object at one particular moment in time. Once such indexing has been completed, it is rarely revised or modified. Overall, the process attempts to eliminate semantic ambiguity by integrating the information object into the existing knowledge organization structure.

Even allowing that this largely static approach to the organization of information resources was optimal, it seems increasingly clear that it is not sustainable (cf. Calhoun, 2006). Practical approaches to knowledge organization must take into account not only the dynamic nature of knowledge, but also the alacrity required to cope with the expanding universe of resources. (The expanding universe might be better characterized as an explosion, with a proliferation of digital information objects already vastly outpacing the ability for expert human catalogers to classify resources at the rate of production.) In her articulation of “Cataloging 2.0,” Simpson (2007) suggests that libraries should focus on “enhancing resource discovery through all available avenues” (510). One such avenue that merits consideration is to focus knowledge-organization practices on making explicit the many types of relationships that exist among/between resources. This approach centers on a document’s potential to be simultaneously “about” something in one context, yet still “mean” something different in another context (Beghtol, 1986).

Consider the myriad conversations that can be prompted by a great essay or a provocative documentary. Different individuals engage with such works from their own personal contexts; they derive meaning from the information they encounter in the resource, or they relate it to other resources or contexts. As an information object endures (or simply gains wide audience), a multiplicity of contexts centers on it through use by various people. All these contexts coexist simultaneously – and each context was relevant to one or more individuals at some point in time. This potential for an information object to relate to a multiplicity of contexts is not inherent in the document itself, but rather the result of people engaging with and using its content or ideas. In other words, the information becomes part of a conversation. Multi-conversational approaches to knowledge organization would allow for these networks of context and use to organically relate information objects to one another.

Delineating strict lines between knowledge, context, and use is beyond the scope of this paper; suffice it to say that such constructs have a complex and intricate nature. The point here is that conversation seems an apt metaphor to encompass the multifaceted, inclusive, opportunistic nature of humans engaging with ideas. These ideas may come from the person sitting by your side, or these ideas may by facilitated by an information artifact. In the latter situation, the conversation exists in the cognizing individual’s mind: perhaps grappling with the thoughts of a “dead Greek,” or perhaps getting inspired by a piece of Afro-Cuban music on her iPod.

3. Conversation Features for Knowledge Organization
Consider the traditional knowledge organization process in terms of a conversation paradigm. While a document may be perceived within the context of prior conversations (the sources it cites, etc.), these are rarely made an explicit part of the knowledge organization system. By extension the object, as it is represented in the system, is also typically divorced from the multiple future conversations of which it might later become a productive part. (Namely: a priori enumeration of an item’s use is inevitably limited to some notion of “conventional” or “expected” users – so creative and unexpected uses are difficult/impossible to predict.) Incorporation of citation networks into knowledge organization systems may help to articulate these very clear artifacts left behind as evidence of conversations. When the object’s representation exposes these conversations, it helps make more transparent how knowledge is created contextually and in turn creates new knowledge. [2]

Formal, academic citations represent a linkage between documents: a statement that a relationship was made connecting the ideas in an earlier source to the current one. In the hyperlinked environment of the Web, Google’s PageRank algorithm works on a similarly conversational principle, relying on millions of users creating literal links among web resources. In short order, those same users were also linking and conversing among one another: reading, writing, and commenting on personal blogs. A great deal of conversational exchange occurs on the blogosphere; Weinberger (2007) characterizes blogs as being “in conversation with one another…captur[ing] a global dialogue of people with different backgrounds and assumptions but a shared interest” (146). Other Web 2.0 phenomena are similarly conversation oriented, and much attention has been given to the phenomena of social tagging and folksonomies (e.g., Golder & Huberman, 2006). These bottom-up classifications offer new opportunities for researchers to unobtrusively observe real-world knowledge-organizing practices involving photos, bookmarks, and Web pages.

One area that has not garnered close examination is the knowledge-organizing practices that occur in collaboratively created wiki environments. Sites such as Wikipedia invite users to actively participate in the creation of content, refinement of this content, and resolution of content disputes. Wikipedia makes such conversational exchanges explicit, not only by archiving changes over time (providing access to previous edits, allowing readers to see how the content has changed), but also by maintaining a parallel discussion (or “talk”) page for each article. Participants exchange ideas and opinions, engage in discourse, and debate how best to change an article: quite literally carrying on conversations to produce new knowledge.

The conversations generated in such collaborative online environments offer opportunities to observe, not only how knowledge is created, but also how users participate in various knowledge-organizing activities. Before discussing the different types of knowledge-organizing practices observed in Wikipedia, it is important to underscore a particular distinction here: that the knowledge-producing and knowledge-organizing activities on wikis are all subject to collective review. Any single edit must endure the scrutiny of other interested participants. In terms of the knowledge organization system, this means that uniquely personal indexing terms – such as “toRead” or “me” commonly seen in tagging environments – do not survive Wikipedia’s classificatory landscape. Knowledge organization tools and indexing terminology evolve over time as the community of participants attempts to reach consensus. (In keeping with the rest of Wikipedia, parallel discussion/talk pages also exist for various features of the knowledge-organizing systems.) Since all users potentially have a voice in how content is organized in wikis, these massively collaborative environments offer a different approach towards knowledge organization.

These participatory systems allow users to be directly involved in organizing knowledge, shifting reliance away from institutionalized controlled vocabularies towards more democratically derived terminology. In addition to the collective agreement on terminological matters, Wikipedia has cultivated several other explicit knowledge organizing mechanisms. Some are prosaic (e.g., section headings within articles, per the manual of style [3]) or automatically generated (such as the table of contents within articles). But others knowledge-organizing features of Wikipedia display a relatively high level of sophistication, commensurate with standard LIS practices: disambiguation pages [4] resolve the problems of synonymy, while “infoboxes” [5] assist users in navigating among related articles. The most fundamental level of knowledge organization on the site entails the use of an extensive, collaboratively generated system of categories. [6]

Further empirical study is needed to assess the overall scope of knowledge-organizing activity that pervades Wikipedia. The effort involved in simply maintaining the current knowledge-organizing structures would suggest that the scale of active, participatory knowledge organization is considerable. Whether or not Wikipedia proves an enduring feature of the Web, it seems unlikely to be the last online massively collaborative authoring environment. [7] Understanding the behaviors and motivations currently underpinning such participatory knowledge organization practices may help to form theories about distributed, collaborative knowledge organization. Such a framework may benefit from leveraging a conversation paradigm, allowing for holistic consideration of knowledge-organizing activities that range from social tagging, to wikis, and beyond.

4. Opportunities for Knowledge Organization
Others have proposed the notion of conversations as a worthy approach for LIS practice. Tuominen, Talja, & Savolainen (2003) specifically suggest “reorienting our knowledge organization strategies from the description of the contents of documents as relatively stable entities toward mapping and visualizing conversations, perspectives, and debates” (562). The community of knowledge organization professionals has a unique opportunity to focus attention onto dynamic and changing conversations instead of solely on the information objects themselves. Such a shift requires a fundamental examination of how to treat information objects: moving from anticipated contexts to actual contexts, from definite order to spontaneous order.

Current knowledge organization practices are based largely on anticipating the potential use and context of information resources. If conversations are accepted as the building blocks of knowledge, with their attendant robust context, then actual use would seem to offer a valid approach for knowledge organization. In this regard, one can imagine navigating through a digital collection where resources are arranged based not on a single linear dimension, but instead on multiple dimensions that result from behaviors such as linking, annotation, adaptation, etc. The resulting environment would be rife with trails and paths that reflect actual uses and contexts.

An analogy to the physical world may prove useful here. Most college campuses have a central outdoor area that is a focal point, e.g. the quad surrounded by notable or landmark buildings. While this area typically has a number of paved routes, it likely also has one or more shortcut footpaths worn into the grass. Contrast this with a typical information system: the paths for users exploring organized information environments are provided by formal metadata. The LIS tradition has paved a number of routes through these environments, but has historically not developed systems that accommodate the user-generated footpaths as well. Enabling users to participate in the organization of resources in digital environments offers the potential to capture a number of interesting things about any particular footpath: who created it, when, how helpful others found the path for their particular need, etc.

Embracing this type of evolutionary, organic approach may be particularly important when multiple, competing viewpoints focus on the same information resources. Such contested grounds are inherently biased and/or political, and efforts to describe or classify such resources rarely concede multiple knowledge claims as equally valid. By accommodating and making explicit the myriad conversations that convene on an information object, knowledge organization systems could transform an apparent ambiguity into a new kind of clarity. Exposing the nature of the classification – not a single classification, but many classifications – and contextualizing the various conversations would be at the core of such a knowledge organization system. Creating richer knowledge organization structures may entail discarding traditional LIS notions of neutrality in favor of a more perspective-explicit framework. By allowing users “to challenge existing perspectives, classifications, and vocabularies” (Tuominen, Talja, & Savolainen, 2003, 564) – in short, allowing them to participate in the practice of knowledge organization – massively collaborative environments become locations where the tension of ideas is accepted as essential to the nature of knowledge.

5. Implications for LIS Practice
A recent report commissioned by the Library of Congress (2008) predicts that “[t]he future of bibliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based” (4). While it remains to be seen which recommendations will ultimately be accepted by LC, the tenor of the report is clear: the status quo approach to knowledge organization practices in libraries must be broadly reconsidered. Several of the report’s proposals suggest enhancing future systems with a focus towards user-contributed data: namely, designing systems not only to accommodate data from multiple sources, but also to link and relate user-contributed data appropriately. The logic of LC’s report seems very much aligned with an appreciation for the power of massively collaborative participation. The Library of Congress is currently investigating the opportunities afforded by participatory networks. LC and Flickr announced a joint partnership in January 2008: encouraging users of the online photo-sharing site to describe – through free-text tags and comments – some 3,000 items from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division (Oates, 2008; Havenstein, 2008).

If the recent LC report and the partnership with Flickr are any indications, it would seem that the world’s largest library is readying to reinvent LIS practice. Yet unlike LC’s pivotal role in the centralized preparation and distribution of library cataloging throughout the 20th century, reinvention now entails the mediation of different types of data from multiple sources. A key challenge for LIS practice will be the transparent representation of data sources at appropriate levels of granularity. Participatory information environments will not only rely on the nature of the relationship between two entities (e.g., Shakespeare is the creator of Romeo & Juliet), but also the identity of who established that particular link and when.

Knowledge organization is ultimately about establishing relationships. Relationships exist between and among different types of things, connecting and linking them together. The FRBR model (IFLA, 1998) provides the LIS community with a range of entities to be linked and related in the bibliographic universe: works, persons, concepts, etc. While the link between a creator and a work might often be unproblematic, [8] other types of relationships may not be so straightforward. These are the interstitial locations where conversations occur: what is Romeo & Juliet actually “about,” according to whom, what does the work “mean,” to certain people, over time, etc. In such cases, knowing who has established a relationship (created a link) between a particular work and a particular concept might be quite important if the source turns out to be your colleague, your professor, or your professional society. In effect, knowing the source of – the who behind – a link connecting two entities communicates something about who values that particular relationship. The above scenario plays out on multiple levels: with links being established by both individuals and on behalf of various communities (e.g., academic organizations, nonprofits, etc.). While this is partly about credibility (e.g., I trust when my colleague establishes a relationship between a work and a concept in our field), it is also about the conversation going on in a particular community. Making the sources of the links/relationships explicit in a knowledge organization network holds potentially important value propositions for users: be they already ensconced in the conversation of a community, or attempting to familiarize themselves with the conversation in an unfamiliar community.

Involving users in helping support knowledge organization has already begun on the commercial Web. Sites such as Amazon.com extensively employ user comments and rankings to build a robust conversation around books, music, movies, and other objects. Amazon now involves users to “help others find” an item by making “search suggestions.” By specifying relevant indexing terms that the user believes should retrieve a particular item, “Search Suggestions are intended to improve Amazon search by helping people find relevant items which otherwise wouldn’t appear in search results.” [9] Such involvement and trust of users stands in stark contrast to the austere nature of the surrogate records in most library OPACs. Analysis of successful commercial enterprises, coupled with the results of projects such as the LC/Flickr partnership may inform innovations for LIS practice and system development.

In an examination of new technologies that will likely form the foundations of a more semantic web, Borland (2007) characterizes a blending of the Web’s current “capacity for dynamic user-generated connections” blending together with “a dash of data mining, with computers automatically extracting patterns from the Net's hubbub of conversation” (66). It would seem that Pask’s (1976) notions about machines engaging in, and learning from, conversations might be ideally suited to our current Web environment.

6. Conclusion
Conversations have been suggested as a valuable way to consider the creation of knowledge, and by extension the organization of knowledge. Conversations pervade our daily lives, and artifacts of many such conversations now feature prominently in a Web environment of weblog trackbacks, wiki edits, etc. As more individuals contribute to both the implicit and explicit organization of knowledge, participatory knowledge organization behaviors merit further investigation. Current collaborative authoring environments offer a potentially important perspective on knowledge-organizing practices, with users participating in conversations around emerging classifications. Users are becoming empowered to supplement and/or revise existing knowledge structures, adding their voices to a larger conversation – ultimately shaping how information is organized and discovered. Such collaboratively created classifications need not necessarily replace existing or established schemes, but instead could connect numerous relevant knowledge-organizing schemes as part of a multi-vocal knowledge-organizing conversation. If noted technology commentator David Weinberger (2006) is correct that “better knowledge is a property of conversations” (17), then perhaps conversations can also be the source of better knowledge organization.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization in Toronto.

References
Beghtol, C. (1986). Bibliographic classification theory and text linguistics: Aboutness analysis, intertextuality and the cognitive act of classifying documents. Journal of Documentation, 42 (2): 84-113.
Berman, S. (1971). Prejudices and antipathies: A tract on the LC subject heads concerning people. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow.
Borland, J. (2007). A smarter Web. MIT Technology Review, 110 (2): 64-71.
Calhoun, K. (2006). The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other discovery tools. Final report prepared for the Library of Congress. Available online: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf
Dervin, B. (1977). Useful theory for librarianship: Communication, not information. Drexel library quarterly, 13 (3): 16-32.
Dervin, B. and Nilan, M.S. (1986). Information needs and uses. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 21: 3-33.
Golder, S. and Huberman, B. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32 (2): 198-208.
Havenstein, H. (2008). Library of Congress taps Web 2.0 for user photo expertise. New York Times, 17 January 2008.
IFLA (1998). Functional requirements for bibliographic records. Available online: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.pdf
Lankes, R.D., et al. (2007). Participatory networks: The library as conversation. Information Research, 12 (4). Available online:
http://informationr.net/ir/12-4/colis/colis05.html
Library of Congress (2008). On the record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. Final report: 9 January 2008. Available online: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/
Oates, G. (2008). Many hands make light work. Flickr blog, 16 January 2008. Available online: http://blog.flickr.com/en/2008/01/16/many-hands-make-light-work/
Olson, H.A. (2002). The power to name: Locating the limits of subject representation in libraries. Boston: Kluwer.
Pask, G. (1975). Conversation, cognition and learning: A cybernetic theory and methodology. New York: Elsevier.
Pask, G. (1976). Conversation theory: Applications in education and epistemology. New York: Elsevier.
Scott, B. (2001). Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory: A domain independent constructivist model of human knowing. Foundations of Science, 6 (4): 343-360.
Simpson, B. (2007). Collections define cataloging’s future. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33 (4): 507-511.
Svenonius, E. (1992). Classification: Prospects, problems and possibilities. In: Classification research for knowledge representation and organization, edited by N.J. Williamson and M. Hudon. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.
Talja, S., Tuominen, K., & Savolainen, R. (2005). “Isms” in information science: Constructivism, collectivism and constructionism. Journal of Documentation, 61 (1): 79-101.
Tuominen, K., Talja, S., & Savolainen, R. (2003). Multiperspective digital libraries: The implications of constructionism for the development of digital libraries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54 (6): 561-569.
Weinberger, D. (2006). Conversation and the cult of expertise. KMWorld, November/December: 16-17.
Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York: Times Books.

Footnotes
[1] Pask (1976) applied Conversation Theory in the realm of educational pedagogy.
[3] Clearly the idea of citation networks and citation indexing originates with Garfield, but is raised here to be considered as an aspect of the conversation paradigm.
[3] See Wikipedia Manual of Style, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Section_headings
[4] See Wikipedia guideline on disambiguation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation
[5] See Wikipedia Manual of Style, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(infoboxes) ; see also Wikipedia’s navigation templates, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Navigational_templates
[6] Wikipedia guideline on categorization, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization
[7] The expert-oriented Citizendium wiki launched in March 2007.
[8] Notwithstanding claims of plagiarism, or attribution of Shakespeare’s plays to Francis Bacon, etc.
[9] Amazon.com. Search Suggestion FAQ. Retrieved January 20, 2008, from http://www.amazon.com/gp/associations/help/faq.html

LIS educators and professionals all wrestle with the rapid pace of technological change, and the past two decades have challenged our schools to prepare future librarians for a technology landscape that is constantly in flux. Some technologies will be fads, but others will become fundamental to library practice, and new technology will always be on the horizon. How can LIS curricula best address this state of affairs, properly balancing between technology concepts and features, readying library professionals whose work will impact our field and society? With this broad question in mind, Syracuse University Professor R. David Lankes invited a group of LIS faculty and policy administrators to engage in a conversation about holistically integrating technology into the LIS curriculum.

The group gathered on the morning of January 9 at the Free Library of Philadelphia; most attendees were in town for the annual meeting of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). After introductions, Lankes opened the session by presenting a brief overview of Web 2.0 technology innovations as well as related national policy issues. Network policy specialist Carrie Lowe provided an overview of the ongoing work taking place at the Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP). Part of ALA’s Washington Office, OITP is actively engaged in both education and lobbying efforts that bridge the intersections of libraries, technology, and public policy.

Lankes described his ongoing research project with OITP about the evolving landscape of information technology and its implications for the education of LIS professionals. The concept of participatory librarianship is central to this work. Lankes framed libraries as being “in the conversation business” – positing that knowledge is never static, and that the resources and collections capturing our knowledge are the products of ongoing conversations. Robust conversations require the involvement of a diverse group of participants, and this is where LIS professionals can position themselves. Physical library spaces are already being largely reconceived: as places where book storage takes a subsidiary role to fostering community conversations and the creation of new knowledge. Libraries that wish to be a vital part of these conversations will increasingly have to invest in tools and services to enable such community participation.

All those gathered at the meeting engaged in an open discussion about the notion of participatory librarianship, what it meant for LIS curricula in general, and how it could affect LIS technology education specifically. After sharing some of the technology initiatives going on at LIS schools, the conversation shifted to the need for durable concepts. The degree to which a technology does or does not nurture participation was discussed, as were fundamental professional skills: leadership, collaboration, and problem solving. In many library settings, hiring new staff is a key mechanism for introducing innovation – yet this model is hindered by all the pitfalls inherent with navigating a new institution’s culture. Educating future LIS professionals to effectively manage and enact change – not only technological, but also wide-ranging organizational change – was viewed as an area for increased curricular attention.

Another theme emerged from the group discussion: the desire from LIS educators to more systematically engage in conversations about the evolving mission of libraries and the changing nature of the overall LIS field. While individual faculty members repeatedly raised these issues in classes with students, said conversations were often incomplete (e.g., limited by the scope of particular course) and would benefit from the input and involvement of more faculty. This final perspective seemed an appropriate culmination to the morning’s discussion. It is vital to the entire LIS community that faculty members not only stay engaged with the latest developments in their particular research area, but also actively participate in the ongoing conversations taking place in the broader library field. The meeting thus concluded with a consensus to bring this message home with us and keep the conversation going.

Contextual Background
Over the past few decades, new information and communication technologies (ICT) have made inroads into business, education, and personal lives. The present generation has seen computing technology transition from the mainframe to the mobile phone. The technical capabilities of these systems that were originally only available to highly trained professionals are now in the hands of children. Technology is affecting how we communicate, store, retrieve, and process the information in virtually every aspect of our lives. During these decades of transition, technological possibilities have been increasing faster than our ability to understand their impact on the people using them. For various reasons, certain individuals and segments of society have not kept pace with these developments. Gaps have developed between the “haves” and the “have nots” as well as between the “users” and “non users.” Why have these gaps developed? How can we understand them? Are they predictable?
The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework, the Behavioral Adoption Framework, to further our understanding of these gaps and the differentiations in adoption that have caused them. I am using the term “framework” as opposed to “model” because the factors I discuss are generic in nature and not specifically defined. Before this framework can be examined, it is necessary to explain the historical context and development of previous frameworks, models, and theories. Basic attempts to answer these questions about adoption have developed in two streams of academia. These streams are found in Informations Systems and education. It is my assumption that these two streams of investigation are not mutually exclusive, but are actually converging. My goal is to combine the strengths of each approach and synthesize a new framework that is broad enough to address technology adoption in any context without loosing its explanatory power. Why is a new framework necessary? One might argue that current theory is sufficient to explain this phenomenon. Therefore, discussion will begin with a survey of current theories which originated in the discipline of Information Systems (IS) during the 1970s and 1980s. The discussion will include an examination of previous models and theories and then a description of the proposed framework. Because the digital divide perspective is newer, less developed, and lacking the theorietical frameworks of the IS models, it will receive only enough attention to orient the reader to the fundamentals of that perspective.

Adoption from the TAM Perspective
The first stream of academic discussion is on the concept of adoption as usage. This has developed within the field of Information Systems and the business community. The goal here is the successful usage of technology. It generally assumes that the user already has access and concentrates on factors which affect intentions to use the technology already in hand. This began with the TAM, Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989), and the TRA, Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1973). This theory and its accompanying models have an older lineage than the digital divide discussion and also a more limited context for usage. Over time, scholars have added additional factors to increase accuracy of these theories, but they still have significant weaknesses (Venkatesh et al., 2003). Later discussions will examine this approach in detail.

Current Theories
TRA/TAM/TRB
The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is one of the most prominent theories in Information Systems (IS). The basic premise is that “perceived ease of use” and “perceived usefulness” combine to influence “behavioral intention” which in turn affects actual system “usage” (Davis, 1989). TAM is based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1973). Another variant of TAM built on TRA is the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Azjen, 1985; Azjen, 1991). The fundamental assumption of both TRA and TPB is that attitude toward an act or behavior and perceived behavior control are the main factors affecting behavioral intention and ultimately behavior itself. The focus is on the user’s beliefs and attitudes. TBP also adds the factor of a subjective norm. TPB and TRA both focus on the factors which lead to intentional behavior. These theories are not identical, but use the same logic and same general approach predicting behavior. Figure 1 by Wixom and Todd (2005) represents this graphically.

Figure 1

It shows that how a person thinks about a behavior leads to intention to use. For the sake of brevity, these collected theories will be referred to generically as TAM/2.
TAM, as indicated by the name, focuses on the acceptance of new technology which leads to actual usage. TAM has been tested extensively and demonstrated significant results but has been subject to numerous revisions including TAM2 (Davis and Venkatesh, 2000). In this case, the originator of the TAM model realized that there were other significant factors external to the user and the user’s perceptions of usefulness or ease of use which did affect usage. TAM2 adds “social influence processes (subjective norm, voluntariness, and image) and cognitive instrumental processes (job relevance, output quality, result demonstrability, and perceived ease of use)” (Venkatesh and Davis, 2000, p. 187). This is a step in the right direction and attempts to provide a richer picture of factors affecting acceptance. However it is still not complete. For example, someone could perceive a system as not useful, but use it anyway because subjective norms require usage. In fact, Venkatesh and Davis found this very disconnect in their study. “Subjective norm” had a negative correlation (-0.047, p<.001) with “perceived usefulness” but a positive correlation (0.44, p<.001) with “intention to use” (2000, p. 197). Additionally, issues of access, ability, and policy which might hinder participation are not addressed by TAM/2. TAM/2 is designed for measuring usage in the workplace. In such a context, there are assumptions which would not apply outside a workplace context. Employees are assumed to be trained, given adequate equipment, and can be required or even forced to use a system. Many, if not most, of the most widely used technological systems are voluntary and outside the work environment. Personal usage may require upgrading one’s own hardware, self-training, and a strictly personal choice. Finally, TAM and TAM2 (together referred to as TAM/2) focus on prediction of usage and do not address barriers to usage. It is as if it assumes that usage will happen. TAM/2 is like a one-way street headed toward usage. The theory necessary to explain today’s context of usage should be a two-way street that explains factors which both enable and hinder usage. For these reasons, the TAM is not a sufficient theory to explain general technology usage.

UTAUT
UTAUT stands for Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. UTAUT is built on the same basic model, but expands the number of factors leading to behavioral intention and use behavior (Venkatesh et al., 2003). The purpose for addressing this model separately is that it significantly expands the factors which lead to use. It includes: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, gender, age, experience, and voluntariness of use (Figure 2) (Venkatesh et al., 2003). While these factors continue to be a step in the right direction, it is this author’s opinion that they do not address enough factors when attempting to explain IS systems outside the workplace. The main focus for everything becomes behavioral intention.

Figure 2

There has proven to be a high correlation between intention and use, but one may ask “How is this really useful?” There is a definite tendency for people to do what they intended to do. The growing complexity of “everything before intention” seems to indicate a fundamental weakness of this basic focus on intention based model of usage. As the saying goes, “To the man who has a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail.” In this case, “To theories based on TRA, everything affects intention.” It would seem prudent to take a step back and look at those factors which affect intention. UTAUT purports to account for “as much as 70% of the variance in user intention,” however “future research should focus on identifying constructs that can add to the predication of intention and behavior over and above what is already known and understood” (Venkatesh et al., 2003). However, the solution may require going beyond intention all together.

Other Models
Several other recent models have attempted to modify TAM/2 to account for the newer, more complex user and usage environment. There are dozens of TAM/2 variants of various qualities which seek to incorporate various factors and constructs. Two were chosen specifically for their attempt to adapt TAM/2 to the complexities of more real-world environments.
The first example (Figure 3) crosses over from usage to participation (Yoo et al., 2002).

Figure 3

However, the similarity to TAM/2 is obvious. This model simply replaces one item with another: “perceived usefulness” with “managing strategy,” “perceived ease of use” with “IS quality,” “intention” with “sense of community,” “attitude” with “visit,” and “usage behavior” with “participation.” Participation is certainly a broader conceptthan behavioral usage and community aspects are vital, but this model still follows the original TAM/2 model.
The next model by Dholakia et al. (Figure 4) also tries to expand the TAM/2 model to include a richer representation of value perceptions and social influence variables (2004). This model shows progress in that it also steps outside of a work/job environment. Elements such as self-discovery, social enhancement, and entertainment value do begin to broaden the scope of usage to account for voluntary systems. However, there is a certain artificiality and seeming randomness to the directions and connections which represent causality.

Figure 4

Classification of Factors
As a first step toward proposing a new model, it would be appropriate to evaluate the current models and see which factors they include to begin to create a classification scheme or taxonomy of concepts. The following classifications are general in nature. The task of classifying factors is complicated by authors’ use of identical terms with separate meanings. This list of articles comes from an exhaustive article by Venkatesh et al. (2005) which surveys the major TAM/2 modifications from 1989 to 2003 and proposes the UTAUT model. The list of theories is given by Venkatesh et al., but the categorization of factors is original (Figure 5). The purpose is to see which factors have been addressed by TAM/2 developments and which factors may still be lacking. The four categories are from the Behavioral Adoption Model proposed in this paper. It is interesting to note that these models focus on personal factors because the focus is on the personal intention. However, as the diagrams and historical progression have demonstrated, this has not been satisfactory so subsequent research has had to chronologically backtrack. In reverse chronological order there is behavior, intention, attitude, and “other factors” (personal, contextual, etc.).

Figure 5

The next chart (Figure 6) includes some of the other factors which have been added to the “classic” theories and models given above. As one can see, there is greater diversity in the utilization of both the vocabulary and the categories.

Figure 6

While there is still a definite orientation to a work environment, especially in terms of technology, there is a significant increase in personal competence and cultural values. One can also see from figures 5 and 6 is that most models and theories do not address all for sets of factors: technology, competency, cultural values, and personal values. They have emphasized peronsal values and cultural values with only relatively recent consideration of technology and competency. What is needed at this point is a framework which explains factors that influence motivation and ability and move beyond the relationship between intention and action.

Adoption from the Digital Divide Perspective
The second stream of academic research on adoptiong focuses on access and has developed into discussions around the “digital divide” (Warschauer, 2002). The digital divide perspective on adoption began with discussions about access to ICT. Much of the attention was on access to broadband as well as socioeconomic and political issues. Investigation then shifted to usage skills which are referred to as information, digital, or technical literacy. These are the first and second levels of the digital divide.
The original concept was that the primary barrier to adoption was access. Initial digital divide discussions were about whether schools had sufficient access to ICT. It was couched in terms of “haves” and “have nots.” This led to the push for increased access to the internet in public schools, universities, and libraries (Hargitai, 2002; Warschauer, 2002). The assumption was that if people just had access, then they would take advantage of the opportunity and adopt these new technologies. However, it has been demonstrated that having access does not guarantee usage (Crump and McIlroy, 2003). Bridging the access gap still did not create adoption and integreation (Crump, 2003). Possession of ICT did not guarantee adoption of ICT.
Following the “bridging” of the first level digital divide, attention shifted to information literacy skills and the educational component of adoption. Access alone was deemed insufficient (Hargittai, 2002; Waschauer, 2002). This conclusion has led to an emphasis on technical competencies and educational initiatives (Dewan and Riggins, 2005). Because of progress in briding the first level divide over the past decade, ICT access is commonplace in schools, public libraries, and many home settings. Most of the academic work at this time is investigating competencies and education so that students will know how to take full advantage of this technology.
This is basically where the conversation stands at this point. Most studies have been weak on theory and demonstrated little explanatory power (Becker, 1999). I propose that is due to issues related to policy, culture, values, and beliefs that needed to be addressed. These factors have not gone unnoticed, but on the other hand they have not been integrated into a broader framework, model, or theory (Becker, 2007; Warschauer, 2002; Mardis et al., 2008). Some have pointed out the importance of the political or environ