Putting Digital Libraries to Work: Issues from Experience with Community Memories

Community memory can provide the crucial bridge between large-scale digital libraries and the day-to-day activities of a community's members. Just as a digital library is based on a general structure and conventional means of access to diverse collections of materials, a community memory culls and shapes the structure of this collection to meet more particular needs; it provides a unique perspective on a larger, more general collection. Useful and usable community memories require support for: (1) the acquisition and evolution of content and structure; (2) the maintenance of mutually intelligible organizations; and (3) the identification of relevant materials. In this paper, we explore issues related to these three requirements based on our experiences with the development and use of shared hypermedia information resources.