Example 10.1 Ethnography in LIS
Seale, M. (2000) Project Ethnography: an anthropological approach to assessing digital library services, Library Trends, 49 (2), Fall, 370-85.
This research project took an ethnographic approach to evaluating digital library services within a university. The various communities (micro-cultures) were identified and investigated using participant observation to reach a deeper understanding of the individual communities (engineers, educator, service providers), and how context impacted on service use and satisfaction. Seale argues that in order to truly evaluate a service it is necessary to reach an understanding of the micro-cultures that from the major stakeholders then determine ‘satisfaction’ based on the nature of the micro-culture, not based on generic standards and expectations that can be assumed to apply to all users in the same way.