Community Inquiry: Framing DL Creation and Study Ann Peterson Bishop University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science ICA Annual Meeting / May 28, 2005

What is a digital library? Set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching and using information… DLs are constructed by and for a community of users (extension of institutions/places like museums, labs, public spaces) (Borgman, et al., 1996)

Digital libraries as sociotechnical systems From DL Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation (Bishop, Van House & Buttenfield, 2003) Attend to social practice: people’s routine activities that are learned, shaped, and performed individually and together Practical everyday reality of schools, libraries, homes, museums, churches, clinics, neighborhoods in which DL use happens Network of social and material relations in which DLs are embedded : people, activities, technology, artifacts, knowledge, values

My community: Paseo Boricua Mile-long section of Division Street in Chicago's Humboldt Park “Barrio autonomy” (Rinaldi, 2002): autonomous cultural, political, and economic space for Puerto Rican and Latino/Latina residents that came into being as a response to encroaching gentrification and displacement in nearby sections of the city (Flores-González, 2001)

A natural alliance: DLs and community informatics Study and practice of enabling communities with information and communications technologies (ICTs) (Gurstein, in JoCI, 2004) A rich variety of social experiments in what we term community informatics (CI) are giving community-activists, policy-makers and citizens a new set of possibilities for fostering social cohesion, strengthening neighborhood ties, overcoming cultural isolation and combatting social exclusion and deprivation (Keeble and Loader, 2001)

The challenge: creating DLs that help communities work How do actual communities work to address their problems? What theory adequately accounts for the complexity and diversity of (distributed) collective practice? What tools are needed to mediate work on concrete tasks within communities? What is the most effective process for developing shared capacity in the form of knowledge, skills, & tools?

American pragmatism and community inquiry William James ( ) Charles Sanders Peirce ( ) John Dewey ( ) Jane Addams ( ) See Menand’s The Metaphysical Club

The cycle of inquiry “Genuine intellectual integrity is found in experimental knowing.” John Dewey

How do we learn together? ”It is the democratic faith that [intelligence] is sufficiently general so that each individual has something to contribute, and the value of each contribution can be assessed only as it entered into the final pooled intelligence constituted by the contributions of all." --John Dewey

How should we live together? “…the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to extend democracy beyond its political expression.” --Jane Addams

Living & learning together: DLs as “pragmatic technology” The common language notion of how to design tools to meet real human needs, accommodate to users, and situations A conception of design from pragmatist theory, which sees technologies as developed within a community of inquiry and embodying both means of action and forms of understanding. Technology is an end result of, as well as a means to accomplish, community work.

Community Inquiry Laboratory  Community: Collaborative activity around creating knowledge that is connected to people's values, history, and lived experiences  Inquiry: Open-ended, democratic, participatory engagement  Laboratory: Bringing theory and action together in an experimental and critical manner The Community iLab Collaborative - developing a conceptual framework and set of free, open source software for creating DLs

Puerto Rican Cultural Center 30 years in Chicago’s Paseo Boricua neighborhood Philosophy of self-actualization and critical thought, self-determination, self-reliance Galvanizes residents around local issues: cultural preservation, economic development, gang violence Includes many affiliated organizations that help people “learn how to learn” about/in the community

La Casita de Don Pedro Museum: Simple house from Puerto Rico Built by HS students Cultural space: Bomba dancing, artist fairs

Café Teatro Batey Urbano Organized by college students Safe place for teens to meet and express themselves Without fear of discrimination or violence Poetry with a Purpose, neighborhood projects, homework help

Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos HS Alternative HS: More comfortable Safer Small classroom settings and local projects Teachers care!

Vida/SIDA Puerto Ricans in Chicago affected disproportionately by AIDS Local artist & ex- prisoner Luis Rosa painted mural Education and prevention regarding AIDS AIDS clinic also started

Family Learning Center For young mothers to earn HS diplomas Provide daycare Supported by federal funds We learn about our culture, parenting skills

National Boricua Human Rights Network Support for PR political prisoners Active in movement to remove US Navy from Vieques, PR Defends civil liberties and educates against repressive legislation (Patriot Act, etc.)

Paseo Boricua Community Library Project (1/2003) Create a distributed community of inquiry whose participants come from all walks of life University and community collaboration Each has something to learn and contribute Learn how to mobilize neighborhood info and cultural resources for community development activities Address digital divide Enrich library and information science with experiences and knowledge of Paseo Boricua residents

Who’s involved Students from FLC and PRCC high school Neighborhood activists Faculty and students from UI’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science Faculty and students from University of Illinois at Chicago, other universities Librarians, kids, friends…

Experimenting with modes of inquiry Spring/Summer 2003: Weekend work sessions Fall 2003/Spring 2004: Street Academy for HS youth Spring 2005: UI Student projects Summer 2005: Community work days, summer camp, short course? June 2005 Community as intellectual space symposium

Street Academy: HS student goals Earn high school diploma! Gain marketable skills within workforce People skills: collaboration and presentation Technology skills Cataloging and other library skills Create comfortable learning place in PRCC for everyone Learn tolerance, openness to new cultural experiences, and community engagement

Andrés Figueroa Cordero Community Library & Information Center 3d World book collection (4000 vols.) Community tech center Posters, sculpture and art, children’s books Archives: Newsletters, fliers, letters, pamphlets Never been cataloged

Planning for grand opening Students and volunteers will be library staff Developing policies Mission statement Collection policies Job descriptions Planning services and programs Learning management: Grant-writing Publicity

Cataloging Chose Dublin Core metadata/fields (Creator, Title, etc.) Flexible-can use for all collections Meets current standards Vocabulary and description from community Not all that hard! Created own online catalog

Web gallery Digitize PRCC political posters, murals, sculptures Creating online gallery for PRCC website Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos ( ): President of PR National Party; 1st Latino Harvard grad; led Oct. 1, 1950 insurrection against US occupation

Family reading night Started learning about and planning - what makes a book good? Parents and kids come to PRCC and read children’s books with others Kids get used to reading, get closer to parents, enjoy reading

Not enough space Exhibit of prisoners’ art Aesthetics of resistance Community-curated Exhibit installed at UI

Conclusion: DL development as community inquiry Neighborhood organizations, libraries, universities join together as a community of inquiry  Everyone learns librarianship and community development together  Use Community iLab to communicate, collaborate, create and manage content online  Co-designers of iLab software: developed free and simple online catalog that others can use

Conclusion: DL development as community inquiry Every individual must be consulted in such a way, actively not passively, that he himself becomes a part of the process of authority. Dewey, Democracy & Education

Waterfall model

Reverse the flow?

Appropriated Technology: From Assessing Needs to Users as Producers Figures from Ron Eglash h ttp://

Community Inquiry Labs (iLabs) Version 2 Version 3

iLab creation iLabs range in size from an individual to 68 members 5000 hosts in 50 countries

Paseo Boricua Community Library Project PBCL iLab

Social action in communities --C. Wright Mills # people who express opinions feedback channels for action autonomy of the public massfew difficult or impossible organized & controlled no publicmany immediate & effective even against prevailing authority yes

Community Informatics Initiative at UI Social Nets & Community

Community Informatics: Players CIRN (Community Informatics Research Network) Association for Community Networking CTCNet (Community Tech Centers Network) Journal of Community Informatics

Resources Bishop, et al. (2004). Supporting community inquiry with digital resources. Journal of Digital Information, 5(3). Bishop, A. P., & Molina, A. (2004). Felicitaciones, Paseo Boricua! (cover story in the magazine Voice of Youth Activists) Bishop, A. P., Bazzell, I., Mehra, B., & Smith, C. (2001). Afya: Social and digital technologies that reach across the digital divide. First Monday, 6(4). Chivhanga, B. M. (2003). Web knitter's manual - A people approach to produce web content. London.

Resources Elshtain, J. B. (Ed.) (2002). The Jane Addams reader. NY: Basic Books. Greenwood, D. J., & Levin, M. (1998.) Introduction to action research: Social research for social change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hickman, L. A. (1990). John Dewey's pragmatic technology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities. (1999). Returning to our roots: The engaged institution. Washington, DC: Nat’l Assn. Of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. Kennedy, D. (1996). Forming communities of inquiry in early childhood classrooms. Early Child Development and Care, 120(1), 1-15.

Resources Menand, L. (2001). The metaphysical club. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reardon, K. M. (1998). Participatory action research as service learning. In R. A. Rhoads and J. P. F. Howard, eds., Academic service learning: A pedagogy of action and reflection (pp ). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. NY: Basic Books. Stanfield, J. H. (1999). Slipping through the front door: Relevant social scientific evaluation in the People of Color Century. American Journal of Evaluation, 20(3), , Whitmore, E. (ed.). (1998). Understanding and practicing participatory evaluation. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

What is a Digital Library? International Children’s Digital Library Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Prairienet Community Network FunBrain

Appendix: More on iLabs

BeeSpace BeeSpace bricks

LIS 491: Literacy in the Information Age Course website

Ethnography of the University Cross Campus initiative TU Customization and heavy use of “Inquiry Units” t&xmlfile=u13991.xml

Finnish iLabs Active Citizenship groups Sami Serola’s Collaborative Authoring Tools

Surman graph

Opening the process

Shift towards formal and distributed

Usage Statistics for iLabs All numbers are rounded averages from server logs as of May 8, site visits a day 50 iLab sessions a day on average 6 GB of data transfer a month Reaching over 9,000 hosts