The Interaction of Community and Individual Practices
in the Design of a Digital Library
Christine L. Borgman, Professor & Presidential Chair
Dept of Information Studies, Box 951520,
Graduate School of Education & Information Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520

Abstract
For a single digital library to serve multiple
communities, design must be based on an understanding of practices in each of the communities andof relationships between those practices. This paperdraws upon data from two large, collaborative research projects, the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) and the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Our findings suggest thatusers’ roles, and the degree to which those roles are
based on individual or community interests, is an
important determinant of how and whether they will
use a digital library. In turn, the effect of users’ roles
varies by the type of content in the digital library(i.e., primary vs. secondary sources) and by theuser’s level of expertise in the knowledge domain.
Despite these complicating factors, digital libraries
have the potential to align the activities of scientists
and students by providing context for the scientificprocess and by representing data in ways that are
useful for multiple purposes.
Keywords: Scholarly communication, knowledge communities, teaching, learning, infrastructure,
digital libraries, uses, users, science, geography,
biology, sensor networks, undergraduate students,
high school, K-12 schools

1

Introduction

Digital libraries have become an essential technology for providing access to information in a networked world. They also provide a means for people to share knowledge within a community and forcommunities to share knowledge with each other.
From an economic perspective, the more communities and purposes that can be served by a single
digital library, the greater the potential cost-benefit
ratio of the investment. From a socio-technical perspective, however, many traps and challenges await
the unwary digital library designer who attempts toserve multiple communities with a single system [15]. Digital libraries are complex systems that support many activities associated with the seeking, use,creation, and sharing of information [6]. These
activities can be performed in many ways. If one
digital library is intended to serve multiple user
communities, design must be based on an understanding of practices in each of the user communities
and of relationships between those practices.

We have several decades of research on how individuals use information systems such as digital
libraries. Much less research exists on informationrelated practices of user communities [3]. In thisshort paper I explore the interaction between individual activities and community-driven information
practices in the design of digital libraries that are
intended for multiple user communities. My analysis
draws upon data from two large, collaborative research projects funded by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation, the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) (http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu
http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/adept/) and the Center for
Embedded
Networked
Sensing(CENS)(http://www.cens.ucla.edu), and upon my own earlier research in scholarly communication, information seeking, and human-computer interaction. The
symposium on digital libraries and knowledge communities, of which this paper is a part, provides anopportunity to speculate on explanations for some of
the results of these two research projects.

2
Background: Goals of the ADEPTand CENS projects
The ADEPT and CENS projects are generating as
many questions as answers about how to design
digital libraries and other information services for
multiple communities and multiple purposes. Comparing the questions and results arising from each of
the projects leads to some useful insights about the
influence of individual and community practices on
the design of digital libraries. First, some background on the goals and status of the projects isnecessary.
Our overarching goal in the ADEPT project is tomake geo-spatial information resources that are
produced and described for research purposes also
usable for teaching and learning at the undergraduatelevel. The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), constructed as part of the (U.S.) Digital Libraries Initiative Phase I (1994-1998), provides access to geospatial resources in many media via sophisticatedsearching mechanisms [7]. ADEPT is a set of services associated with the ADL intended to support
multiple purposes: enable faculty to construct lectures and assignments using content from the ADL
and other sources, enable teaching assistants (TAs)in lab sessions to use the information resources assembled by the supervising faculty, and enable stu-dents to explore the lecture resources and to perform
interactive assignments that utilize data, simulations,and other information resources assembled by theirinstructor. Thus ADEPT has three user communities(faculty, TAs, students), and two purposes (researchand teaching). We are presently in the last year of afive-year research project (1999-2004) and haveproduced a series of papers on the design and deployment of ADEPT at two university campuses [812].
We have similar goals in the CENS project, except that we are working with real-time data being
generated by scientific research projects rather thanwith resources that are already collected into a digital library. The data will be collected and organized
as they are generated by sensors in the field. Our
three communities – scientists, teachers, and students (grades 7 through 12) – all will have access tothese data in real time and access to archives ofpreviously generated data. Our goals are to understand the information management practices andrequirements of the scientists, teachers, and students
so that we can design digital library services to support them.
Other researchers on the CENS education teamare concerned with designing teaching modules andstudying inquiry-based learning. Our CENS researchis in much more formative stages than is the ADEPT
project. We are presently in the second year of the
five-year grant to the Center (2002-2007), and are
pursuing additional funding to explore in more depthsome of the issues discussed here.
Both the ADEPT and CENS projects involve
scholars in their role as scientists. In ADEPT we areworking with geographers; in CENS we are currently working with biologists and will expand into
other disciplines associated with the Center. Bothprojects involve primary data sources; i.e., datacollected for research purposes that have received
little, if any, prior analysis. In ADEPT we are studying how faculty select and use primary sources intheir own teaching, whether from their own research,from ADL, or from other sources. In CENS we are
studying how researchers, teachers, and students willcollect, select, organize, and use primary data thatare being generated continuously from field instruments. Location, as determined by geo-spatial coordinates (latitude and longitude) are essential data
elements in both projects.
In ADEPT, researchers and teachers are the same
people (i.e., university faculty) in different roles. In
CENS, the researchers and the teachers are different
people, and come from different communities ofpractice, with considerably different degrees ofknowledge about the scientific domain. Both projects aim to facilitate inquiry learning, which is amethod of involving students in scientific practices
so that they gain a deeper epistemological under-

standing of science [13, 14]. Using primary sources
to conduct research in ways that scientists do is an
essential part of inquiry learning. The ADEPT software is being deployed in undergraduate courses,
and mostly in introductory courses that meet general
education requirements. CENS’ students in grades 7
through 12 are likely to have even less science background than do the ADEPT undergraduates. Teaching assistants (TAs) are a user group specific to
ADEPT. These are graduate students (usually at the
PhD level) who conduct weekly laboratory sessions
in large undergraduate courses for small groups ofstudents. The TA’s role is to reinforce concepts fromthe lectures given by the faculty, answer student
questions, and distribute and mark course assignments.
While both projects focus on the use of primarydata, in ADEPT we also are studying faculty use of
secondary sources (e.g., published literature) as ameans of understanding and comparing their practices for teaching and research [10]. A related aspectof the ADEPT project is to determine how faculty
employ primary and secondary resources in theirteaching.

3

Community and individual practices

With a decade or so of research on digital libraries behind us, the challenges of designing a system
to support the richness of information practices
within any one user community are now apparent[15]. Digital libraries often are “boundary objects”[16, 17] between user communities, because they
serve different purposes for each of those communities. In this sense, digital libraries can be a means totranslate practices, data, and knowledge. It may only
be in the process of negotiating the design and implementation of a complex system such as a digital
library that these differences in practices become
apparent. The flexibility that digital libraries offer
for searching, using, creating, and managing information can be destabilizing to a community (e.g., ascientific research group). For example, a digital
library may enable activities that were the exclusive
role of one person or group (e.g., senior scientists) tobe performed by others (e.g., graduate students,
external partners), and thus contribute to changes inroles and norms [4, 18]. Most studies of the relationship between digital libraries and community
practices have focused on research communities inthe sciences [15, 19, 20]. The ADEPT and CENS
projects introduce two new variables to the interaction between digital libraries and communities: (1)the paired communities have great disparity in domain knowledge and data management skills, fromhigh expertise (faculty and research scientists) toalmost complete novices (students in grades 7-12

and in introductory undergraduate courses), and (2)the same digital libraries are intended to serve different, and potentially competing, purposes – research and teaching. We are encountering many of
the same community practice issues reported in otherresearch, plus new issues raised by the differences inrequirements for research and teaching applications.
The differences in expertise and purposes of theuser communities we are studying in ADEPT and
CENS highlight the tension between individual
activities and community-driven practices in the useof digital libraries. People often function in different
roles and interact with their environment accordingly. In some roles, use of a digital library may be
driven by individual interests. In other roles, use ofa digital library reflects practices common to acommunity such as researchers, practitioners, teachers, or learners. I propose that the role in which aperson interacts with a digital library is a significant
determinant of his or her user behavior. A personusing a digital library as a researcher, for example,
will frame a query in different terms than when thatsame person is using a digital library as a teacher.
Roles may be distinguished by the degree to which
the orientation is more individual or more community-driven. The effect of the user’s role also varies
by the type of content in the digital library (i.e.,
primary vs. secondary sources) and by the user’slevel of expertise in the knowledge domain.
In our research on ADEPT and CENS, we arefinding that scholarly communication appears tohave the strongest community orientation and teaching the strongest individual orientation. Similarly,
the use of secondary sources follows more community-based practices than does the use of primarysources. These findings are discussed in a sequence
from the strongest community orientation to thestrongest individual orientation.
3.1

Primary vs. secondary sources

3.1.1
Scholarly communication and digital
libraries
Digital libraries for secondary source content
such as scholarly publications have a long history,
evolving from several decades of research on textbased information retrieval systems. Digital libraries
of scholarly content now play a key role in scholarly
communication – the means by which scholars in
any field use and disseminate information throughformal and informal channels. It is inherently acommunal endeavor. Scholars write for each other,making them different from authors who write forthe trade press or mass media. Scholars publish theirwork to stake their claim to their ideas and results
and to get credit for their accomplishments. Theycite the publications of others for reasons such as
describing prior research on which they build; giving

credit for prior theories, methods, or discoveries; orrefuting prior findings [21, 22].
Scholarly publication has a formalized structure,
usually negotiated within each field over long periods of time. Publication manuals such as that of theAmerican Psychological Association [23] codify theformat of articles (e.g., sections of a document andwhat should be included in each, such as the introduction, literature review, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions) and the format of bibliographic references. Journals and conferences specify
the scope, format, and content of articles in theircalls for papers. Instructions to reviewers specify
criteria for acceptance. These structures continue to
evolve through community-based processes such as
editorial boards and program committees. Eachdiscipline has its own practices, which may vary
greatly between the sciences, engineering, medicine,social sciences, and humanities. The practices areneither simple nor stable, but all build upon an incentive structure that has evolved since the earliest
print journals, which is to get credit for one’s workthrough a peer review process. As new genres ofelectronic publication emerge, they build upon existing community practices [6, 22, 24]. Digital libraries now also support the informal processes ofscholarly communication, through “pre-print” repositories such as arXiv.org and the circulation ofworking papers via other forms of institutional repositories such as California Digital Library’s escholarship [25] or Dspace at MIT and elsewhere[26].
Digital libraries of scholarly content are boundary
objects between those with greater and lesser expertise in a field. Experts view digital libraries as repositories for their work. They contribute to digital
libraries, but may search them only rarely. Novices
view digital libraries as sources of content. It is they
who search digital libraries most often. Rather thansearching databases, senior scholars rely on informal
processes of scholarly communication to receive
information about new work. By the time a journal
article is published and appears in print or in a digital library, those “in the know” already know about
it – they have received it directly from colleagues, as
drafts or pointers to a repository, through presentations or discussions at conferences and colloquia, or
through conversations or email. Thus senior scholars rely heavily upon their “invisible college” foraccess to information [27]. For this community, thepublication is the formal record of the research. For
the student, the high school teacher, or others new to
a topic area, the bibliographic infrastructure ofscholarly communication provides the means todiscover and retrieve the records of research. They
search indexing and abstracting services, catalogs,
digital libraries, physical libraries, known journals,
and the websites of known researchers or research

groups. Thus it is the novices who rely upon metadata and on the formal structures of documents tolocate and retrieve information resources [28].
Publications (whether conference papers, journal
articles, or books) embody the activities involved inresearch. These documents reflect the negotiation
within a research team about what story will be told,
how it will be told, the choice and format of data to
support the results, conclusions and interpretations tobe drawn, and who will receive authorship credit.
Readers of a scholarly document interpret it in thecontext of other work on which it builds or withwhich it may conflict. Interpretations also are influenced by external factors such as readers’ opinionsof the journal, authors, laboratory, or funding agency[22].
Our studies of geographers in the ADEPT project
confirm earlier research on scholars’ informationseeking behavior in support of research. They reporttypical behaviors such as browsing library shelves,browsing personal collections, following citationreferences in articles, asking colleagues, visiting new
book and new journal issues shelves in the library,
and attending conferences [21]. All of our subjects
use online sources, and many continue to be heavy
users of campus libraries and print sources [10]. We
have not yet asked similar questions of CENS researchers, but have no reason to believe that theirresearch-related information seeking is atypicalscholarly behavior.
3.1.2
Digital libraries of primary scientific
data
Digital libraries of primary scientific data have a
far shorter history than do digital libraries for secondary, published resources. Practices associated withprimary scientific data also are less well developed.
Yet the pressures and incentives to develop such
digital libraries are considerable. Research groups
have become larger and more geographically distributed, requiring shared repositories as a means tocollect and organize their data. Shared repositories
enable researchers to compare and combine datafrom multiple projects and to conduct longitudinal
analyses that might not otherwise be possible oraffordable. Funding agencies have encouraged, andsometimes required, researchers to make their primary data available to others. Some journals requirethat data sets be deposited along with the journal
article that reports on those data. Funding agencies
also may encourage or require research projects tomake their data available for educational applications, from K-12 through university, which is among
the drivers of the ADEPT and CENS projects.
For generations of scholars, the journal article or
the book was the end product of research. The
scholarly communication practices of each fieldprovide a framework within which to document eachproject, survey, or experiment. Recently, however,
the trend is toward scientific data and databases
being the end product of scientific research [19].
Establishing community practices to provide accessto primary scientific data sources is turning out to be
extremely difficult, for a variety of socio-technicalreasons [3-5, 15, 18-20, 29-31]. Scholars share dataand collaborate on a day-to-day basis, but do so insocial and organizational contexts where trust, practices, assumptions, and reciprocity are in place.
Where journal articles provide a context for scientific data, digital libraries decontextualize those samedata [4]. Scholars often are reluctant to post theirdata openly where it risks being misinterpreted orused out of context. They also may lack incentives
to document and clean the data sufficiently for it to
be used by others [19]. Building trusted institutions
around digital libraries of primary data that encourage reciprocity appears to be a key requirement forsuccess [4].
The communities of practice associated with secondary sources are much larger than those associatedwith primary sources of data. For example, those
who work on various aspects of water quality may
read and publish in the same journals, but take very
different stances on the use of primary data depending on whether the data are intended for use in environmental studies or industrial applications [4].
Determining the optimal size of community that canshare a digital library of primary source data is a
research question worth pursuing. A small researchteam with a common set of instruments and a common set of goals has incentives to share data. Large,
competing teams may have fewer incentives toshare, even if they have the same instrumentation asother teams. A critical mass of users is required todevelop software to support specific metadata formats for data management and data analysis. Highly
specialized metadata formats to serve narrowly defined communities are expensive to maintain, but
generic metadata formats may lack sufficient granularity for a research team’s requirements.
The choice of metadata format is an important
technical and economic matter. Metadata choices arealso epistemic choices, however, for they determine
how knowledge is conceptualized and interpreted.
Designers of digital libraries have begun to consider
the “epistemic cultures” of user communities as ameans to explain some of these factors [4, 32, 33].
In the ADEPT project, we are studying the criteria by which users select resources from this repository and from other sources. ADEPT is an outgrowth of the Alexandria Digital Library, thus westarted with an established repository. We wish tounderstand more about their knowledge processes,
such as how these users judge the value, authenticity, or usefulness of an item for a particular purpose.
These appear to be highly individualized, diverse

practices. We have determined that no single DL
can provide the range of desired resources for oursmall sample of geography faculty. Complicating
matters further, individual items are used and described differently on different occasions [10].
Among our first activities in CENS was to explore the data management practices of participating
research teams, which span a wide range of scienceand technology disciplines [34]. At one extreme ofdata sophistication in CENS is the seismology community, which has a long history of highly instrumented data collection, and contributes its data to ashared repository (Incorporated Research Institutions
for
SeismologyIRIS)(http://www.iris.
washington.edu/). This community appears to haveconstructed a trusted and shared repository within an
institutional framework. By contrast, the habitat
biology community is more typical of CENS research teams. The habitat research team captures andmanages their data locally, using locally developed
metadata models that build upon models from theirconstituent disciplines. We have chosen to focus our
initial research efforts on the habitat monitoring
project as it provides an opportunity to observe, andparticipate in, the development of data management
models and practices for a new technology (embedded networked sensors) and because it provides
educational opportunities suitable for our schoolcommunity (grades 7-12 biology and physics).
3.2
Research [and, or, vs.] teaching1
Comparing the use of digital libraries in researchvs. teaching reveals how individualistic informationrelated behavior can be. The ADEPT and CENS
projects are among a very few to compare information-related activities for research and teaching. In
both projects, the use of scientific data for research
purposes is the reference point. The Alexandria
Digital Library was constructed originally as a repository of research materials; ADEPT attempts to
add services to make these resources useful for undergraduate teaching by those same researchers. In
CENS, our goal is to make the same data streams
from sensor networks concurrently available to scientists and to teachers and students in grades 7-12.
In the latter case, the data must remain useful andusable to the scientists while also being useful for
educational applications.
While a wide array of studies have involved scientists and scientific data in educational activities(more so in K-12 than undergraduate), the vast majority of those projects have avoided the dual data
management problem by providing students withprocessed or “canned” selections of data for scripted

1

With thanks to Pam Samuelson for this metaphor,in [35].

activities. Scripted approaches contribute to ourunderstanding of how inquiry learning can be accomplished, but do little to leverage the investment
in scientific data production.
From the first stages of the ADEPT project wewere struck by the individual nature of undergraduate teaching and the associated information-related
behaviors. Observing three different instructors
teaching the same introductory course in three consecutive academic terms, we found that they eachused different textbooks, assignments, and examinations. Their choices of teaching methods and examples varied accordingly [8, 36]. Our current challenge lies in determining how to transfer tools andcontent from the instructors with whom we prototyped the system to a larger community.
As a starting point for the ADEPT research, we
had naively assumed that sharing primary scientific
data between research and teaching would be largely
a matter of providing good tools, because the same
people (university faculty) are both the researchers
and the teachers. However, it is in the transfer ofdata between research and teaching that we haveencountered the greatest disconnect in the ADEPT
project. Most of the faculty that we studied (at two
major research universities) are sophisticated usersof technology in addition to being sophisticatedresearchers. Several of them participate in large
projects gathering data from distributed sensor networks and satellites. Some build climate models onsupercomputers. Some have Unix workstations on
their desks. Even those at the more humanistic endof the research spectrum are sophisticated users ofimages and archives. Yet most of them leave mostof their technology behind in their offices when they
enter their undergraduate classrooms. Instead, they
carry colored chalk, stacks of transparencies, andsometimes slides, maps, or samples such as rocks.
They teach from textbooks rather than from primarysources. When they do bring primary research data
into their teaching, it is usually from their own research, and it is usually in a synthesized form (maps,
images, tables) rather than as raw data for students tomine in course assignments. Even if textbooks contain CD-ROMs of images, movies, and other supplemental examples, few of the faculty in our study
look at them, much less employ them in class lectures or student assignments [8-12]. Thus digital
libraries of primary sources appear to be boundary
objects between the roles of faculty: these systems
serve very different purposes to them in their roles as
researchers and their roles as instructors.
One aspect of the tension between digital libraries
for research and teaching is the ability to control
one’s own resources. Many of the faculty we interviewed for ADEPT expressed a desire to use theirresearch data in teaching – especially slide collections – but were reluctant to release them for generaluse by others [10]. We have addressed this problem
in the architecture of ADEPT by enabling each instructor to construct his or her own “personal digital
libraries.” Individuals can gather their own resources
into one place as a subset of the larger digital library.
They can choose to share, or not to share, their personal digital libraries with other faculty. This approach also resolves some problems of intellectual
property rights, as faculty commonly teach withmaps and other examples for which they do notcontrol copyrights [10, 38].
The degree of individual or community orientation is playing out differently in CENS, where researchers and teachers are two different communities, and where the educational application is at K-12
rather than university level. K-12 teachers have farless autonomy in their curricular choices than douniversity faculty. They must follow curricula prescribed by state and national standards. However,within those standards, they have a fair amount of
freedom as to the design of classroom lessons. K-12
teachers commonly borrow good lessons and modules from other teachers, which is another indicationthat teaching is more community-based at the K-12
level than at the university level. As more university
course syllabi are posted online, borrowing among
faculty is likely to increase. This trend is worth
watching, as it may be an indicator of a transition
toward a less individualistic orientation in university
instruction.
In CENS, the differences between research andteaching with respect to primary source data areapparent in the purposes for which those data areused and in the domain knowledge that each community brings to those data. Scientists’ primary goalis the production of knowledge for their researchcommunity, while students’ primary goal is to learn
the concepts and tools of science. Scientists, as partof their graduate study and research training, haveestablished discipline-specific practices to select,collect, organize, analyze, store, and disseminate
data. These practices reflect a tacit understanding
about the nature of science, appropriate questions forresearch, knowledge claims, and the types of evidence required to support knowledge claims. By
comparison, K-12 teachers and students generally
lack deep subject knowledge, research methods
expertise, and knowledge of data management practices.
As noted earlier, research reports must be understood in a context, and putting primary source data
in a digital library tends to decontextualize the data[4]. Providing context for scientific research questions is a central goal of inquiry learning approaches,
which is our goal in ADEPT and in CENS. In education research, context can be framed in terms of
the fidelity between “real” scientific practice and thetools and practices of classrooms. At one pole ofeducational researchers are those who advocate
maintaining a high degree of fidelity between what
students do and what scientists do by having thestudents get involved in live, ongoing scientificstudies often “at the elbows” of real scientists doing
their own research [39]. At the other pole are approaches that create self-contained learning communities within the classroom. They model the processof scientific investigation but do not work directlywith scientists [40]. The design of the tools for accessing, analyzing and presenting scientific data willvary by the approach chosen. Inquiry learning addresses epistemology directly by assisting students
to “think like scientists” rather than to learn “about
science” from textbooks and small, often artificial,
experiments [13, 14]. Thus the match between how
science is done and how scientific data are represented in digital libraries may be as critical for science learners as for scientists.
Fidelity between the practice of science and thelearning of science will require ways of describing
data so that it is useful and usable for both purposes.
Metadata formats for scientific data and for educational applications have emerged as a significant
barrier to consistent representation in both the
ADEPT and CENS projects. Our analysis of metadata models across CENS reveals that scientificmetadata models (e.g., SensorML [41], EcologicalML [42]) describe the data, while educational metadata models (e.g., LOM [43], GEM [44], SCORM[45]) describe the scripted scientific educational
activity. Almost no overlap in data elements exists
between the metadata formats currently in use by thescientific and educational communities we are studying.

4

Discussion and conclusions

Characteristics of knowledge communities are an
important consideration in the design of digital libraries. The difficulty lies in determining whichcharacteristics to consider, and for what purpose. In
comparing findings from two continuing studies on
the design of digital libraries to support research andteaching, it appears that the user’s role is an important determinant of how and whether they will use adigital library. Some roles, such as that of teaching,have a more individualistic orientation and others,
such as research, have a more community orientation. The influence of these roles is stronger in digital libraries of primary data sources than in the useof secondary sources.
Digital libraries of secondary sources (i.e., published documents) can support large communities ofscholars. Individuals who may vary widely in perspective and paradigm can agree on such matters as
the editorial standards for a journal and the choice ofbibliographic format. Digital libraries of primarysources (i.e., scientific data that have received mini-mal analysis or interpretation) support much smaller
communities of scholars. Sharing digital libraries ofprimary resources requires agreement on more micro-level details such as choice of metadata format,
and thus requires more consensus on epistemologicalmatters.
Others have noted that digital libraries often serve
as boundary objects between scientific communities[3, 4, 19, 20]. In ADEPT, it appears that a digital
library is in some senses a boundary object between
the various roles an individual assumes. That is, anindividual may search the digital library in very
different ways depending upon whether the activity
is part of research or part of teaching. It is in theattempt to design a digital library to serve both roles
that these distinctions with regard to system use havebecome apparent. In other words, the differing usesof the digital library make the otherwise invisible
boundary between these roles apparent. Our conclusions from the ADEPT project are that multiple
forms of data representation and more extensivefunctionality are required if a single digital library is
to serve both research and teaching.
When designing digital libraries for use by scientists, teachers, and K-12 students, differences inexpert and novice behavior become apparent. Scientists bring a much deeper knowledge of the scientificprocess and domain to their use of a digital library ofprimary source data than do K-12 teachers and students. If the goal of a shared digital library is toalign activities of scientists and students, as it is ininquiry learning projects such as CENS, then finding
ways to represent “real scientific data” in ways interpretable by K-12 students and teachers is essential. Only in this way are we likely to increase thefidelity between science and science learning.
Improving fidelity through better data modelingwill require substantially new approaches to metadata and to data management. At present, metadata
models for scientific data describe the data, per se(e.g., time, date, sensor location, reading), while
metadata models for learning science describe thelearning experience (e.g., grade level, resources
required for the activity, time to perform the activity,
education standards met). We are finding minimal
intersection in data elements between these two setsof metadata models in the communities under study.
Maintaining the data in a useful form for the scientists is paramount. Thus adapting scientific metadata
models to educational applications is more promising than is adapting educational models to scientificuses. The next phases of CENS research will address
the identification and adaptation of appropriate
metadata models for a specific application, which is
habitat monitoring. In our current and final year of
the ADEPT project, we are focusing on the transferability of digital library tools and resources between
faculty members. The findings of these projects

should contribute to further understanding of theinfluence of user roles, individual and community
orientation, size of community, application (researchvs. teaching), and domain knowledge in the designof digital libraries. Admittedly, these are ambitious
goals, and we may continue to produce more questions than answers along the way.

Acknowledgements
The education and evaluation research in ADEPT
described here is conducted in collaboration with
Anne Gilliland and Gregory Leazer, both of the
Department of Information Studies, Graduate Schoolof Education & Information Studies, UCLA, andRichard E. Mayer, Department of Psychology, UCSanta Barbara. ADEPT is funded by National Science Foundation grant no. IIS-9817432, Terence R.
Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara, Principal Investigator. The educational research in CENS
described here is conducted in collaboration with
William A. Sandoval and Noel Enyedy, both of the
Department of Education, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA. CENS isfunded by National Science Foundation Cooperative
Agreement #CCR-0120778, Deborah L. Estrin,
UCLA, Principal Investigator.
This paper also benefited from thoughtful discussions with Phil Agre of UCLA, Geoffrey Bowker
and Susan Leigh Star of UC-San Diego, and Roy
Pea of Stanford University. Prof. Bowker and Prof.
Enyedy provided helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Stasa Milojevic of CENS assisted in compiling bibliographic references.

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