Copyright Sociological Research Online, 1996

Matthew David and David Zeitlyn (1996) 'What are they Doing? Dilemmas in Analyzing Bibliographic Searching: Cultural and Technical Networks in Academic Life'
Sociological Research Online, vol. 1, no. 4, <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/1/4/2.html>

Abstract

This paper presents provisional results from research into the uses and usefulness of electronic bibliographic databases in academic contexts. The research has been carried out as part of a British Library funded research project using ethnographic, focus group and conversation analytic techniques. Here we address the question: What can different varieties of ethnography and discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of organizational and institutional settings? Online and distributed bibliographic services (such as BIDS - Bath Information Data Services- and locally networked CD-ROMs) have now been available for some years in most universities and are thought to be a positive development. Many questions arise; some of which we hope may be answered by our results: What are they being used for? How are they being used? Are they as useful as central and local providers believe? Why do some researchers not use them? The research discussed here is based upon ethnographic interviews with 93 academics, researchers and postgraduates, ongoing observation as well as four focus group interviews with members of three departments (from different faculties) and with library staff at the University of Kent. We shall examine the cultural construction and negotiation of order and self-evidence. It is by the construction of cultural networks in which routine modes of questioning and criteria of relevance achieve the status of self-evidence that normal academic research communities establish themselves. Nevertheless the failure of this self-evidence to sustain itself sheds light on what ethnomethodologists find most interesting in any institutionalized discourse; its contingent dependence upon negotiations over interpretation and meaning.

Keywords:

Bibliographic Databases; BIDS; Computing; Ethnography; Ethnomethodology; Higher Education; Human Computer Interaction; Information; Knowledge; Library

Introduction

1.1

This paper presents some results from research into the uses and usefulness of electronic bibliographic databases in academic contexts. The research has been carried out as part of a British Library funded research project using ethnographic, focus group and conversation analytic techniques. Here we address the question: What can different varieties of ethnography and discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of organisational and institutional settings?

Sense Making and the Assumption of Rationality

2.1

Online and distributed bibliographic services (such as BIDS - Bath Information Data Services - and locally networked CD-ROMs) have now been available for some years in most universities and are thought to be a positive development (Squires, 1993 and 1995; East, 1993; East et al., 1995; Barry, 1995).The qualitative methods adopted follow from the works of Mellon (1986a and 1986b), Suchman (1987), Robbins & Holst (1990), and Barry (1995). Many questions arise; some of which we hope may be answered by our results: What are they being used for? How are they being used? Are they as useful as central and local providers believe? Why do some researchers not use them?

2.2

The material presented here contains a provisional outline of themes emerging from the work in progress. The research discussed below is based upon ethnographic interviews with 93 academics, researchers and postgraduates, ongoing observation as well as four focus group interviews with members of three departments (from different faculties) and with library staff at the University of Kent. We shall examine the cultural construction and negotiation of order and self-evidence. It is by the construction of cultural networks in which routine modes of questioning and criteria of relevance achieve the status of self-evidence that normal academic research communities establish themselves. Nevertheless the failure of this self-evidence to sustain itself sheds light on what ethnomethodologists find most interesting in any institutionalized discourse; its contingent dependence upon negotiations over interpretation and meaning.

2.3

It might be argued that the differential use of bibliographic databases might be explained in terms of the differential functional utility of different bibliographic databases within different academic fields. It may be true that the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, in relation to the relative amounts of experimentation, non-experimental empirical research and abstract theorizing within them, tend towards different ratios of article and book publication and use. In interviews chemists would often joke that they never read books, while philosophers would quip that they never read articles (only books). Those who don't tend to use articles may not use bibliographic databases that contain article references.

2.4

However, two factors might point to the significance of cultural networks in orientation towards technical networks, over and above simple differential utility. First, those who adopt a 'bookish' self- description, or who come from 'bookish' (rather than article based) disciplines, are not necessarily any better at using book based electronic databases (such as library OPACS) than others. They are less likely to know the more elaborate facilities offered by such systems, or of the possibilities to email/download book based bibliographic material either to another computer, a computer disk or simply to paper.

2.5

Second, they are very often unaware of the existence of facilities that identify and locate books in print (on CD-ROM), or which give access to other library catalogues (such as NISS or the M25 consortium on the World Wide Web). This might all be explained in terms of relative technophobia. As one moves away from mathematically based subjects in academia, so the correlation between mathematical competence and computer confidence has less to do with the actual necessity of numerical skills, as with the density of practitioners, and therefore of people to ask when things go wrong. In the natural sciences this is less problematic than the isolation, and therefore relative ignorance, induced by the cultural relations in relation to technology found in the humanities.

2.6

Figures for the usage of online databases, CD-ROMs and email (see appendix) leave more unanswered than they reveal. A philosopher who used a CD-ROM 'successfully' recently may feel rather pleased and call themselves a user when asked. A chemist who uses CD-ROMs more than the philosopher but finds online sources generally superior may see themselves as a non-user. Figures beg questions about what they mean, that they do not begin to answer.

Assumed Shared Meaning in the Library and Computer Centre

3.1

Assumptions of shared meaning and self-evidence act to exclude by assuming that there is no barrier to entry. Knowing how to go on but not knowing that the choice was anything other than self- evident leads to frustration amongst those 'in the know' when encountering the 'uninitiated', just as not knowing how to go on induces anxiety and distress in 'non- initiates' when faced either with machines that don't seem capable of answering simple questions or help desk staff who don't even realise how much their attempts at explanation assume a prior understanding of what the person asking is, in fact, asking to be explained.

3.2

One of the first things that became apparent through visits to the library to shadow librarians on the help desk and to observe users in the catalogue hall, in January 1996, was a trivial instance of assumed self evidence that, in its simplicity, provides an excellent illustration of the issue at hand. Over the 1995 Christmas break the old library computer catalogue was superseded by an integrated system called Galaxy. There were an array of false starts and user disorientation was intense for a period. Here we consider two examples. The programmers had used the TAB/indent key to enact the command to move between fields within search modes (such as between author and title fields in the author/title search mode). The screen information gave the instruction to press TAB to change fields. However none of the machines in the library had TAB written on the indent key. Instead they had the sign. This produced a wave of enquiries, and no doubt an even greater number of confused individuals. In the end pieces of paper with the word 'TAB' written on them were sellotaped to all the keys in the library. To the programmer the equivalence of TAB and must have been as self evident as 'A' being the capital letter of 'a' would be to a literate Latin script reader. We should not underestimated the power of a single bad experience with a data-base in putting someone off, perhaps for ever. As some of the respondents demonstrated - a failure years ago continues to justify present-day avoidance in the absence of alternative impressions.

3.3

The second instance of an assumed self-evidence was in the use of the instruction SEND to be equivalent to END when sending recorded data from the library catalogue to your own email address. This was all the more problematic as use of this facility was much more likely to be distant from the library itself so making help-seeking more difficult.

3.4

Seeking help and the development and promotion of instruction are crucial areas. The negotiation of meaning between the respective partners to the process requires an overcoming of a paradox, that of the relationship between what the user knows they need and what they need to know in order to find it. Often this process is complicated further when the process of negotiating what you need to know to find what you know you need changes your sense of what you were looking for in the first place.

3.5

Learning how to ask a database the 'right questions' raises interesting questions itself about the formation of 'criteria of relevance'.This is well illustrated by different modes of learning to use various electronic databases.

Philosophers in the Computing Lab

4.1

An interesting instance of the disjuncture of taken for granted modes of shared understanding was recounted initially, by a member of staff from the philosophy department and then elaborated by others. It concerned the attempts made by the University Computing Service to give a better service to members of the humanities faculty. As the Computing Service's funding was based on a per capita student basis it was criticised internally for focusing its resources towards the engineering, maths and sciences, while nationally JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) was placing a greater emphasis on computing skills development for the humanities and social sciences.

4.2

The Computing Service laid on a series of classes for staff and research students in different departments, including philosophy. They soon became extremely frustrated at the apparent incapacity of philosophers to keep up with their class plans or to remember materials from one class to the next. The drop out rate in the courses was also a source of embarrassment to the Computing Service and department.

4.3

It seemed that when the instructors from the Computing Service could not explain something to a philosopher using their own technical terminology they would use metaphors. The problem was that the metaphors were themselves very often drawn from the field of computing and so tended to assume the very prior knowledge of the field that the philosophers were lacking.

4.4

While the Computing Service has since developed liaison workers to try to establish what different departments' staff and research students need, it is still the case that computing staff find it hard to understand the closure that their language effects on those whose specialism is not computing. In interviewing the philosophers it was remarkable to find that most staff and research students who claimed to use networked computers said that when they had problems they went to see the member of staff who first relayed the story, rather than go anywhere near Computing Services. When one researcher pointed out the extent to which other members of the department saw this person as a computer expert he was quite shocked as he admitted he felt his basic know how was not a good basis to train a department. Nevertheless, his ability to speak to philosophers in their language about computing, despite his non-expertise, made him a far better source than the experts.

The Library Enquiry Desk and its Training Seminars

5.1

Another crucial feature of an academic community is the discursive horizon within which communication is dense and beyond which is it more irregular and less attended to. This was highlighted whenever the library attempted to run training seminars for its new technology. The courses were advertised extensively around the campus but each session was only attended by a few individuals. The problem lay in the fact that the courses were not integrated into any departmental routines and so were not being talked about amongst either staff or graduates. Contra-wise when interviewing graduate students about training courses they had been on, almost all claimed that these courses had been recommended to them either by their supervisor, or by other graduates. Attention to these patterns of communication which make up discursive horizons is again a crucial consideration when designing training courses and in promoting and organising them. As will be pointed out below there are significant differences in the level of discursive integration within different departments and these significantly effect the use of bibliographic databases and learning to use them.

Assumptions About Technical Networks Based On Cultural Networks

The Authority of the Author in Philosophy (and the Politics of Data-Base Management)

6.1

The primary heuristic devise for discerning relevance within philosophy was the authority of the author. Books, first and foremost, containing both what attempt to be coherent arguments and extensive bibliographies, provide the key to beginning new philosophical investigations. The key to starting research then was in the selection of those authors and those of their works that would provide the web of bibliographic references through which an introductory set of questions would be formulated.

6.2

For research students this foundational moment in their work was always the result of prior reading in combination with the recommendations of supervisors and other 'mentors'. It is at that point that a researcher might want to use bibliographic databases, both in order to find out about an item's whereabouts, or to seek out additional works by authors cited in the bibliographies to prior works read. The research student tended to work alone in quite detached relation to their supervisor and other postgraduates, and this lack of interaction with other researchers meant that information about new databases, and how to use them, did not spread very far, and there was little sense of backup when things went wrong.

6.3

The way that more established academics worked was again within networks of knowledge about key authors in the field, only these networks would be personal rather than solely bibliographic. The key network was the cultural network of interaction, held together by conferences, seminars and more informal and personal meetings. Editorial boards, conference committees etc. acted as nodes within this cultural communications network. Interestingly those academics particularly interested or at least confident in electronic communication used email, Web pages and news groups as means of finding information about, and from, others in their field more than they did standard bibliographic databases. Fundamentally this was to use the technical networks to replicate and develop the cultural networks they, and their less computer literate colleagues, were already a part of.

6.4

Such networks, while technically mediated, were not such that could be simply learned, they had to be joined. Competence develops through participation within the discipline and becoming accepted as a conversant. Many of the staff interviewed actively resisted getting email addresses on the grounds that it would flood them with uninvited enquiries and comments from people whose correspondence they had not solicited. Having office hours was a way of containing the flood of enquiries from one's own students. The prospect of unlimited access from the whole world was greeted with some fear, yet we note they did not extend uniformly across media: the same people would answer the phone and (at least) open letters.

6.5

In relation to new departures, academics are much like research students in seeking out the works of reputed authorities in the field and working backwards through bibliographies, but academics are more likely to refer to their personal contacts. The use of electronic databases in developing a bibliography in a new field was seem as a paradoxical process by many who did use them, and as largely unhelpful by the majority. The sense that unless you knew what you were looking for prior to doing the search you would only get out a whole string of irrelevant references (or 'funnies') led those who did use them to suggest that such searches were only useful as a 'stimulating' scatter-gun, neither accurate or comprehensive, while non-users tended to see the scatter as counterproductive or of no use.

6.6

While the scatter-gun approach was criticized, the reverse criticism was also given that as electronic databases, just as with paper sources, have to select material. There is always a political dimension in selection that may be seen as biased or exclusory. The politics of inclusion and exclusion involves a good degree of lobbying and jockeying. Is feminist theory to be classified within philosophy, and is Radical Philosophy too political? Philosophers trusted more the editorial selectivity of other philosophers over the editorial selectivity of the commercial publishers of CD-ROMs and online databases (despite the editorial involvementof philosophers in them). As Philosophy in Britain loses its paradigmatic Anglo-American framework most philosophers are reluctant to accept BIDS or Philosopher's Index as the guide to the totality of their discipline, preferring the judgments of their close circles of sub-field-specific colleagues.

The Authority of the Laboratory in Chemistry (and Field Fragmentation)

Ways of searching are changing all the time, it seems that every time you go to do a new search you need to learn a new way of accessing to information ... and this can be very infuriating, but I guess that is what you would call progress. (Interview transcript)

6.7

The laboratory system of team work places every new postgraduate entering into an ongoing set of dense discursive practices. Initiation into the discursive community means not only reading the recommended papers and books written or read by prior members of the laboratory, it also involves education in the best means and sites for bibliographic searching for new materials:

The library funds a certain amount of basic journals and materials, but the rest comes from very uncertain research grants.

6.8

Different groups within the Chemistry Department access a diversity of databases that are unavailable to other laboratory groups, and are not provided centrally for Chemistry in general, by the Library. As such, laboratories become increasingly focused and distant from each other:

... increasingly now the tendency is to publish in increasingly small sub- fields, both in terms of textbooks and with journals.

6.9

Within the Laboratory the team knows what they are up to but organization of materials is utterly idiosyncratic:

The problem often is at the moment ... that when a postgrad leaves they leave a pile of papers and these are then not indexed in any way for following students entering the team.

6.10

Nevertheless the idiosyncrasy of each laboratory group intensifies the initiation process for new research students entering the closed circle of collaborators. The new graduate student is expected to understand what is going on, and yet the order that exists is not formalized or set down in a set of rules. As such the new inductee learns from an intense dependence on those around them, in recommending texts, correcting behaviour and interpretation, as well as directing their perception. Such informal order generates mutual interdependence:

I mean my filing system is a pile on my desk ... I don't know where it is but I know its here somewhere ... it's a microcosm of my life.

6.11

Coordination was regularly called for in the interviews:

What is necessary is an increasing amount of communication because the data-base that he's accessing is of interest to these three fellows...

What the department could do with is try to collate a database on what is available in the department as a whole - in everyone's offices there are a mass of papers.

... a nodal database system that could be linked into a nodal network.

6.12

For all the many calls for such a librarian's tidy up operation, no such prospect was liable to be put into effect given that all the laboratories had more than enough to be getting on with in their sub-fields. While field fragmentation and the ordered chaos of laboratory practice may enable nonlinear creativity, isolation combined with increasing commercial pressure to produce marketable results as soon as possible is reasserting linearity:

... pressure to focus ... government is forcing a closer relation between business and academy ... the first question is based on whether there is a business related application for the products of the work, and whether someone will be willing to commercially fund the research.

The push is toward more short term research ... by definition ... business ... wants answers to certain questions.

The Authority of the Technology in Economics (Research Students vs. Staff in the use of BIDS)

6.13

It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that all the economists interviewed adopted the same attitude towards BIDS. This was not the case. What was interesting was the way that research students expressed a common faith in BIDS as a means to satisfy their needs as researchers. This shared acceptance of the technology as primary was facilitated by the high levels of interaction between economics graduates sharing two offices with terminals. The level of interaction and communication between postgraduates was high and if one person was able to get round a particular problem this rapidly became common knowledge for the others.

6.14

Staff were more divided about the accuracy and comprehensiveness of BIDS. This was at least in part facilitated by their knowledge of alternative sources through which material not forthcoming on BIDS could be accessed. In particular, staff drew on institutional contacts, journal subscriptions and the circulation of work in progress from other universities. Staff are also integrated into research field networks of personal and institutional contacts.

6.15

Compared to chemistry research students, those in economics are far less integrated in their research with either their supervisor or with fellow students (although in the latter regard they are far more integrated than those in the humanities). With respect to relations with their supervisor, economists are less integrated/regulated, and so were less likely to acquire the alternative research strategies that would take the edge off their faith in BIDS.

Research as Cultural Creativity: Ethnographic and Ethnomethodological Reflections: Negotiating Questions

7.1

The ethnographic approach to the 'social study of science' sheds light on the practical production of 'knowledge' within cultural networks. As Steve Woolgar has it: 'One general objection [to ethnographies of science] is that focus upon the activities at the level of the laboratory bench is inappropriate because "this is not where science happens"' (1988, p. 89). It is essential that the social relations of scientific production are studied at the level of the cultural networks that extend through and beyond the immediate physical research 'event'. This is true for both laboratory work and individual searches of databases conducted in front of a computer terminal.

7.2

While demonstrations of how 'taken for granted social competence...' emerge within academic communities of judgment and interaction, rather than through pure rational/empirical engagement with reality, this, following Bloor (1991), while challenging knowledge producers to be reflexive about the cultural processes in which their production takes place, does not constitute an exercise in discreditation as such.

7.3

The value of ethnomethodological ethnography lies in compounding the reflexivity of the cultural practitioners. It is premised upon the reflexive accounting actors already engage in and enact their interaction through. The extent to which academic communities are particularly amenable to such research, and, it might be hoped, amenable to consider the results of such research as a positive contribution to the reflexive continuation of such practices, lies in the very ontological openness of social life that is the basic presupposition of ethnomethodology.

7.4

The application of this appreciation of academic production as a practice in which criteria of relevance are learnt and then interpreted and negotiated as part of a community of dense interaction should redirect our attention when thinking of how new bibliographic information technologies are, and are to be, integrated into the work of academic researchers, from undergraduates upwards.

7.5

The data collected from interviews and focus groups with academic and library staff, postgraduates and researchers, at the one site, some aspects of which are discussed above, will be further analyzed in relation to data collected at two other university sites, as well as with data from focus groups interviews with undergraduates from different faculties and in different years (first, second and third) at the first site. This material was gathered in the second half of 1996. Parallel research has been carried out, within the British Library Ethnographic Research on Bibliographic Services (BLERBS) project, through the course of 1996 on 'human- computer interaction' (in relation to the use of electronic bibliographic databases). This involved dual computer screen and terminal user video recording along with immediate and follow up interviews with users. Data was analyzed using conversation analytic transcription and analysis. Central to this dimension of the BLERBS research is the question of how users make sense of the 'messages' they receive, the strategies they adopt, and the break-downs which occur in their searching attempts. The question of whether human-computer interaction (HCI) should be understood, theoretically, as a mode of conversation (with its implication of mutual orientation towards understanding the other), is taken as secondary to that of whether users themselves display such expectations of the machines with which they interact. If conversation analytical approaches to human-computer interaction are right in suggesting human intersubjective communication (the orientation towards understanding the other) is not an appropriate model for understanding HCI, failure on the part of users to differentiate between communicative interpretation of an utterance and a machine's enacting of a command, may be a useful site of investigation for the understanding of many forms of HCI break-down.

7.6

The two dimensions of the BLERBS research programme are then to be related. The fusion of conversation analytic and ethnographic dimensions of ethnomethodology, applied to the analysis of cultural and technical networks of interaction within academic knowledge production and information management, it is hoped, will shed further light upon the issue of how inter-human conversational networks of interaction relate to success and/or failure in human-computer interaction, as well as to the very terms in which success and failure might themselves be measured.

Appendix: Use of Online Databases

	Only BIDS	BIDS+	Others	None	Total
Chemistry	15	29	4	8	56
Economics	7	7	1	2	17
Humanities*	4	1	0	15	20
Total	26	37	5	25	93

Use of Email:
Chemistry	90%
Economics	88%
Humanities*	60%
CD-ROM Usage:
Chemistry	30%
Economists	19%
Humanities*	55%

*Humanities refers to Classics, Philosophy and Religious Studies.

References

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Copyright Sociological Research Online, 1996