Managing metadata: Networks of practice, technological frames, and metadata work in a digital library

The organizations that develop information systems are usually composed of members and groups with different technological backgrounds and experiences. While these different backgrounds are necessary to support the many dimensions of information system development, at the same time they can result in barriers to sharing organizational knowledge, and can thus impede this work. Understanding how the technological backgrounds of organizational groups are constituted and mediated thus provides useful insight into how information system development occurs in organizational contexts. This article contributes to this discussion with a qualitative and interpretive case study of a small team engaged in creating metadata for a digital library. A number of unexpected and recalcitrant problems were encountered that delayed this metadata work. Drawing on theories of networks of practice, technological frames, and perspective making and perspective taking, the article uses ethnographic- and action research-based interviews, to probe project members' understanding of metadata. The analysis identified different networks of practice and technological frames in the project, including the IT workers, who had a systems administration perspective, and the faculty members, who had a theoretical research perspective. The tensions caused by these differences are described, as are the ways in which the project resolved them. Two findings are that the intercommunal negotiation was established not just between individual networks of practice in the project, but with reference to an emerging community of practice that served as a boundary object, and that intercommunal negotiation also had to be carried out diachronically across time, with this latter form of negotiation being difficult to achieve.