‘What are they Doing? Dilemmas in Analyzing Bibliographic Searching: Cultural and Technical Networks in Academic Life’

This paper presents provisional results from research into the uses and usefulness of electronic bibliographic databases in academic contexts. The research has been carried out as part of a British Library funded research project using ethnographic, focus group and conversation analytic techniques. Here we address the question: What can different varieties of ethnography and discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of organizational and institutional settings? Online and distributed bibliographic services (such as BIDS - Bath Information Data Services - and locally networked CD-ROMs) have now been available for some years in most universities and are thought to be a positive development. Many questions arise; some of which we hope may be answered by our results: What are they being used for? How are they being used? Are they as useful as central and local providers believe? Why do some researchers not use them? The research discussed here is based upon ethnographic interviews with 93 academics, researchers and postgraduates, ongoing observation as well as four focus group interviews with members of three departments (from different faculties) and with library staff at the University of Kent. We shall examine the cultural construction and negotiation of order and self-evidence. It is by the construction of cultural networks in which routine modes of questioning and criteria of relevance achieve the status of self-evidence that normal academic research communities establish themselves. Nevertheless the failure of this self-evidence to sustain itself sheds light on what ethnomethodologists find most interesting in any institutionalized discourse; its contingent dependence upon negotiations over interpretation and meaning.