Lisa Covi

Electronic journals and legitimate media in the systems of scholarly communication

While the number of electronic scholarly journals is growing steadily, these journals have not yet been accepted as legitimate publication outlets by the scholarly communities. This article examines how moving from paper to electronic distribution alters the legitimacy and perceived quality of journals. It also examines the prospects for creating diverse high‐quality electronic journals in the next two decades.

Organizational dimensions of effective digital library use: closed rational and open natural systems models

Behind the expectations that Digital Libraries (DLs) will provide access to any document at any time to anyone in any place are questions about whether digital collection, storage, and transmission are useful to people who depend upon library materials. This study focuses on DL use within the context of research activities in Ph.D.-granting institutions. We examine what constitutes effective DL use, how faculty members are using DLs, and how useful they find them. We conducted our study in faculty workplaces: The laboratories and offices where they conduct scholarly research. Our focus is on the human activity systems that unite readers, authors, librarians and researchers with electronic materials, resource streams, computer equipment and know-how. We examine practices involving three clusters of informants: Faculty researchers who produce and make use of scholarly materials, librarians who facilitate access to digital and nondigital collections, and computer support providers who manage the arrangements of electronic resources. Our study, which included two research universities in two disciplines (molecular biology and literary theory), provides a theoretical model for understanding DL use in different social worlds, and suggests preliminary DL use patterns to pursue in a follow-on study.

Such easy-to-use systems!: How organizations shape the design and use of online help systems

Despite the pervasiveness and proliferation of computerized systems, people still get stuck when they are trying to use them. Because organizations are heavily invested in their systems, they seek efficient and effective means to allocate necessary resources to make systems usable. Online help systems attempt to provide such targeted assistance in a variety of modes. This paper will review several online help systems, highlighting the organizational issues inherent in online help by focusing on the organizational arrangements that contextualize the design and use of these systems.

Evaluation of digital library use: How can we understand how contributors create and use scholarly communication?

A persistent problem in understanding the use of technology is that by the time we evaluate it, the technology or patterns of use have changed. Unfortunately, if we design digital libraries based on what we evaluate, we confront the dilemma of creating technology that is out of date by the time it is available. If, instead, our evaluation is based on more stable patterns that guide individual use, we can understand and better predict how to build useful technology.