Lee Iverson

Libraries serve communities. This role begins with the choice and organization of collections, and continues through the choice of services offered. However, the relationship that modern research libraries have with their user community is primarily organized in terms of providing collections and services to individuals as members of communities, rather than to the communities themselves. This session will describe a more expansive model for this relationship and some of the research that will need to be done to realize that model.

The research program to design and build the right tools involves consideration of social epistemology, the sociology and anthropology of communities, semantics and knowledge management, user modelling, human-computer interaction and web-based collaboration infrastructure. The impact, however, could go well beyond the walls of the library and the academy, potentially affecting patterns of work in any organization that depends on the effective exploitation of the knowledge of its members.