S OCIAL ACTORS – PEOPLE USING ICT S

LIS community members work in various types of organizations (e.g.

universities, university departments, libraries, industry), have a variety of job positions (students, researchers, librarians), live in different countries,

and have diverse native and working languages. As the target audience of an LIS collaboratory is so diverse, the motivations for using a collaboratory are bound to differ from the motivations found among actors in successful collaboratories in the natural science and technology fields, where the audience is not so diverse (see Paper I for a review of literature of lessons learned from collaboratories and motivations for scientific collaboration). It may also differ from successful collaboration in organizational settings (e.g.

Goggins, Jahnke & Wulf, 2013; Orlikowski, 2002; Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991). There is a need for an analytical tool that helps to understand this dynamic and complex group of potential collaboratory members. This tool can be the social actors model (Lamb & Kling, 2003).

As activities pertaining to data collection instruments of interest for this study can be assumed to mostly be carried out in educational and professional contexts, it is vital to understand how potential users – LIS students, professionals, and researchers – conduct these activities and interact with them. These activities can be described as information-sharing activities, in correspondence with the previously cited CSCW framework of work coupling by Neale, Carroll and Rosson (2004) (Section 2.1). The CSCW perspective on information sharing is ideal for the thesis, due to its close relationship to other types of collaboration (as types of work coupling), and because of the model’s intrinsic relation to designing groupware in a wide array of settings (including within and between organizations, and in online communities).

As stated, the social actors model is employed in the thesis to create an understanding of the roles and contexts of prospective collaboratory actors, including academia, industry and the public sector. The conceptualization of social actors, i.e. forming an understanding of people’s relationships with ICTs in their professional and organizational contexts, is based on four dimensions (expanded on below): affiliations, environments, interactions, and identities. The affiliations and environments dimensions have an organizational perspective, as they situate the social actors in their organizations, as well as in the industries and environments of those organizations. The interactions and identities dimensions focus on the individuals, as they put emphasis on relationships between and among social actors, as well as between social actors and ICTs that they use. (Lamb

& Kling, 2003) Thus, the social actors model can shed light on a loosely connected community, which might conduct the loosely coupled activity (Neale, Carroll & Rosson, (2004) of sharing and reusing data collection instruments. The environment dimension of the social actors model,

presented next, characterizes the environments that social actors work in, from the perspective of their organizations and other affiliations.

The potential collaboratory actors belong to various types of organizations, in industry, academia, and the public sector. The environments dimension of the social actors model describes the environment of the organizations and networks in which a person works, including locations, associations and practices involved in conducting their work. ICTs can be used to support these practices and relationships, for example by supporting communication between social actors. Some communication practices may have more legitimacy than others. Organizations may use a particular ICT to show that they belong to a particular industry or research field (Lamb & Kling, 2003), e.g. by using a proprietary or free and open software. This dimension may determine whether an LIS collaboratory could be seen as a legitimate ICT to support practices and associations in various types of organizations including libraries and LIS university departments. The organizational entities that constitute the environment for a social actor are related in different ways. These relationships are the focus of the next dimension, affiliations.

The affiliations dimension describes relationships that an organization has to industry and networks via a social actor, for example to professional associations and networks. This dimension sheds light on an important view of ICT use and people using them: that the role of ICTs is to support relationships, and that ICTs cannot have a direct relationship with a social actor; thus an ICT is a means of communication between people. (Lamb &

Kling, 2003) The affiliations dimension may determine how interaction and relationships between future actors could be supported by an LIS collaboratory. One way to understand their contexts, activities and needs in relation to an LIS collaboratory is to describe them as social worlds, meaning

“collections of actors with shared understandings and shared institutionalized arrangements that convene, communicate, and coordinate behaviors on the basis of some shared interest” (Demerath, 2005, no pagination). People may belong to more than one social world, and people may interact in different ways in different social worlds (Mark & Poltrok, 2004). Meyer’s (2006) characterization of free/open source software (F/OSS) developers studied by Scacchi (2005) fits very well in characterizing the connections between the target audience of an LIS collaboratory: “the F/OSS developers are only loosely connected through a fragile web of alliances and communities” (Meyer, 2006, p. 42). Therein lies a challenge: trying to design for such a diverse group of people, whose common denominators are that

they work in LIS and are engaged in activities related to data collection instruments. As the affiliations dimension identifies the relationships between organizations and networks, the next dimension – interactions – characterizes the use of tools that social actors utilize to communicate with each other.

The interactions dimension characterizes which types of information and resources are used in interaction between social actors in different organizations. The social actors will communicate in legitimate ways, by using ICTs that are determined by the industry or discipline. (Lamb & Kling, 2003) Further, the social actors may communicate with each other in their organizational roles (Lamb & Kling, 2003), such as manager, human resources representative, or librarian in charge of acquisitions of digital media. The interactions dimension informs the thesis about how individuals in LIS interact in their roles as members of their organizations. This could be used to inform the design of an LIS collaboratory to encourage collaboratory actors to interact with other actors. The roles that social actors have in their organizations can be sustained by how social actors present themselves, which is the focus of the identities dimension discussed next.

Not only do potential collaboratory actors work in different types of organizations; they may have different roles in their organizations, for example administrator, professor, manager or librarian. A person may have various professional roles in an organization, which may create tensions when expectations and values differ between roles, perhaps on account of being an employee and a union representative in parallel. The identities dimension characterizes how social actors present themselves in the role of organizational members, on an individual and group level. These self-presentations include how people use ICTs to construct and emphasize identities that go beyond their roles in their organizations. (Lamb & Kling, 2003) For example, expert and novice identities are common in collaboratories and online communities (Paper I; Preece, 2000), which is shown by how new members in communities are guided into the community by experts or long-term members. The identities dimension may shed light on how LIS community members use ICTs in creation and reinforcement of identities apart from their organizational roles.

This section described theoretical models for understanding the professional and organizational contexts of social actors, i.e. the people who might use an LIS collaboratory for sharing and finding data collection instruments. The next section describes important social aspects of an LIS collaboratory,

focusing on how to support interaction between potential collaboratory actors.