Research rules for library ethnography

Critical Ethnography for Information Research

Poster Abstract Research in Library and Information Science (LIS) often involves the use of various types of information and of information technology. As such, it is primarily concerned with problemsolving in social spaces (e.g., as manifested in user studies) and in designing and troubleshooting of technological systems (e.g., research in information retrieval in general). Although most infor...

Qualitative research methodologies: ethnography.

Ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities. Its roots canbe traced back to anthropological studies of small, rural (andoften remote) societies thatwereundertaken in the early 1900s, when researchers such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown participated in these societies over long pe...

Project Ethnography: An Anthropological Approach to Assessing Digital Library Services

OFTENLIBRARIES TRY TO ASSESS DIGITAL LIBRARY SERVICE for their user populations in comprehensive terms thatjudge its overall success or failure. This article’s key assumption is that the people involved must be understood before services can be assessed, especially if evaluators and developers intend to improve a digital library product. Its argument is simply that anthropology can provide the ...

Ethnography, education and on-line research

Symbolic interactionist ethnography: implications for information systems research and practice

This paper attempts to contribute to the positivist-interpretivist and rigor-relevance debates in IS research. We accomplish this by reflecting on the implications of symbolic interactionist ethnography for enriching interpretive research, and by highlighting how the adaptation of the “constant comparison” technique from grounded theory may help move the ethnography study towards theoretical in...