Collaboration through Digital Libraries

1. Introduction

Supporting collaboration by computers is an old domain in IT research and applications. In the first period of this research area, the focus was on improving communication by providing better tools such as e-mail, chat rooms and video conferencing. Soon, the focus became broader, and aimed at enhancing cooperation and collaboration. This broader sense includes the topics of joint work, task distribution, meeting support, etc. More generally, the goal of research is to improve the efficiency of groups and to support emerging group behaviors. The name of the discipline, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) was born in 1984, while the applications in this domain are often called groupware. Related terms with slightly different meaning are also used such as Computer-supported collaboration (CSC) or Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Moreover, completely new areas emerged from CSCW including e-learning and social computing.

Groupware went through a dynamic expansion both in functionality and usage. Collaboration facilities appeared in all types of software, including business processes, research, learning and, naturally, libraries. In order to organize the topic and classify groupware applications, the CSCW matrix (Figure 1) was introduced in 1988(Johansen, 1988). This uses two dimensions, namely time and space to separate the types of interactions. To highlight it with an example, the cell of same time and same place interactions represents face-to-face interactions and its supporting applications such as real-time decision support or specialized meeting room software. If we move on to same time but different place interactions, we find simultaneous communication tools such as video-conferencing or shared displays. The same-place-different-time aspect covers applications for continuing tasks, team rooms and large public displays. The most usual type of groupware is the fourth one, the asynchronous tools where time and place of collaborators are indifferent. The majority of groupware based on web and e-mail falls into this category.

Figure 1.

The CSCW matrix (Source: Wikipedia)

Collaboration is traditionally a strong part of libraries. In the Gutenberg-era, libraries were the main source of written material and, naturally, of knowledge. Librarians were not only the preservers of books, but also advisors and distributors of books and knowledge. They acted as social 'hubs' in a place where people often went just to meet and talk with other knowledgeable people, and to collect new information. Cultural or scientific events are still frequently held in libraries; writers introduce their new books or researchers explain interesting research findings for the audience there. Many different types of collaboration may take place in traditional libraries: task solving, research, learning, socializing, entertainment, etc. These activities are to be classified in several ways later in this section.

After the appearance of digital libraries, the above mentioned collaboration needs are still important to deal with. The first conference on digital libraries was held in 1994¹. At that time, the terms electronic library or virtual library were also used occasionally and with the same interpretation, yet today they have slightly different meaning. The essence of digital library (DL) is that it offers and maintains content in a digital format, and as a result it is accessible by using a computing device. This means that practically from the beginning, digital libraries were accessible remotely, through the Internet, and so they were accessible anytime from anywhere. If we consider a digital library system as CSCW software, then we see that it falls into all of the 4 regions of the CSCW Matrix, yet most significantly, it can enable users to cooperate asynchronously and remotely. Although, the first digital libraries were more like simple document collections, the collaborative aspect of digital libraries emerged to be more and more important. An early definition of digital library from Belkin underlines our statement: