The contribution of ethnomethodologically-informed ethnography to the process of designing digital libraries

We describe ethnomethodologically informed ethnography as a methodology for information science research, illustrating it with the results of a study in a university library. We consider the issues that arise in coordinating the results of this research with the needs of information systems designers. As well as showing how ethnography can be used to inform systems design, this also carries implications for addressing the problems of coordinating ethnographic results with the work of other information science research methodologies. We describe our approach to addressing some of the problems of interdisciplinary working between system designers and ethnographic researchers.