The first stage in an engineering design problem is usually described as requirements analysis [Press]: the process of analyzing what it is exactly that the system being designed is supposed to do. This process begins with two questions: What problem are we trying to solve, and what constituencies are we trying to serve?
This paper is motivated by the belief that the digital library community has not thought carefully enough about these questions. While some of the literature discusses requirements, for example [Gladney], these discussions seem to assume a set of problems and proceed to describe the system requirements for dealing with them. The difficulty with these efforts is that none of them seem to assume the same set of problems, with the result that there is little clear discussion of how these different assumptions interact and conflict. The goal of this paper is to begin that discussion