Community design of DLESE's collections review policy

Abstract

In this paper, I describe the design of a collection review policy for the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). A distinctive feature of DLESE as a digital library is the “DLESE community”, composed of voluntary members who contribute metadata and resource reviews to DLESE. As the DLESE community is open, the question of how to evaluate community contributions is a crucial part of the review policy design process. In this paper, technological frames theory is used to analyse this design process by looking at how the designers work with two differing definitions of the “peer reviewer”, (a) peer reviewer as arbiter or editor, and (b) peer reviewer as colleague. Content analysis of DLESE documents shows that these frames can in turn be related to two definitions that DLESE offers of itself: DLESE as a library, and DLESE as a digital artifact. The implications of the presence of divergent technological frames for the design process are summarised, and some suggestions for future research are outlined.