Bonnie Nardi
Research Scientist
Apple Computer
E-mail: nardi@taurus.apple.com
Home page: http://www.research.apple.com/people/Bonnie_Nardi

Designing Diverse Information Ecologies

GENERAL SESSION I: Toward the New Information Profession,
Wednesday, February 12, 1997, 10:00am - 11:00am

Bonnie Nardi will describe her ethnographic research on reference librarians as "intelligent human agents." The study was motivated by her research group's charter to design intelligent software agents. She got some good ideas for software agents from the study, but more importantly, it led her in the unexpected direction of seeing the existence of information ecologies--functioning systems of people, technologies (high and low), ideas and human activities.

She now believes we should design diverse information ecologies rather than technologies in isolation, which is the common practice. She discusses the problems of the invisibility of much of the work reference librarians do and how that might be changed such that librarians will play a high profile role in shaping the information ecologies of the 21st century.

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