Tacit user and developer frames in user-led collection development: the case of the digital water education library

This paper discusses the impact that developers' and users' tacit understandings can have on digital library development. It draws on three years of ethnographic research with the Digital Water Education Library (DWEL) that focused on the observation, collection, and analysis of the project's face-to-face and electronic organizational communication. The DWEL project involved formal and informal educators in the development of its collection, and experienced problems at the start of the project with getting these educators to complete their cataloguing tasks. The research showed that despite having spent several days in face-to-face workshops, the project's Pis and the educators had different tacit understandings of what digital libraries were, that were impeding the project's organizational communication and workflow. I describe how these differences were identified and analyzed, and subsequently addressed and mediated through the design and development of online tools that acted as boundary objects between the PIs and the educators