Scholar's Playground or Wisdom's Temple? Competing Metaphors in a Library Electronic Text Center

THISSTUDY DRAWS UPON THFORIFS from cognitive anthropology concerning the role that metaphors and mental scripts play in organizing human thought and action. Metaphors are implicit cognitive templates that enable people to understand novel situations in terms of familiar ones, while the related scripts provide outlines for how to act in emergent situations. These theories are applied to the ways in which librarians and library patrons conceptualize and respond to electronic texts. In 1994, these authors carried out a qualitative ethnographically informed case study of an electronic text center in a large academic library designed to reveal the underlying metaphors that library staff and patrons used in thinking about electronic texts. This article presents three of the most common sets of these metaphors. The first was a tendency to analogize electronic full texts as regular books. Second, a large body of competing metaphors saw the electronic text center as both a place of play and a place for work. Finally, we discuss metaphors that influenced how librarians and patrons viewed and behaved toward each other.