WebJunction

Librarians have often sought chances to exchange information via conferences, roundtables and gatherings. In the last few years, meeting online has become yet another avenue to explore. Many librarians are taking advantage of the benefits of online communities. Gathering online and staking a claim has become a way to actively participate in an LIS community of learners and commentators. To best participate, we might look at what researchers are finding as they study these communities. Why study virtual communities? The study of virtual communities is important because the pervasive nature of the Internet has linked the world in ways never imagined by early communicators and the impact on information retrieval environments is far-reaching. Future librarians may do their reference work in online communities as well as 21st Century libraries.

Rheingold's The Virtual Community, published in 1993, defined the Internet as an interconnected computer network utilizing Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) to link people all over the globe in open discussions. He also defined  'virtual community' as "social aggregators that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace."

Defining virtual communities further means examining their internal mechanisms and observing the interaction that occurs within. How do people communicate via message boards, blog comments, wiki entries and the like? And how do we identify these behaviors?

Gary Burnett, a professor at the University of Florida, identified the various types of information exchanges in virtual communities. Folks who do not interact but just read posts are known as lurkers, a term used in Internet vernacular. Those invisible participants in the community, he states, read what others have written "without also writing themselves constitute significant information-gathering activities."  The interactive behavior is more interesting. Burnett's typology of information behaviors in virtual communities is presented below.

Interactive Behaviors in Virtual Communities: Burnett's Typology

(Burnett, 2002)

Types of Virtual Communities

As another means of defining virtual community, researchers France Henri and Bétrice Pudelko presented a concise, useful typology for virtual communities in 2003, comprised of four distinct categories and descriptions of the exchanges that occur within them:

1. Community of interest - Information exchange about a topic
2. Goal-oriented community of interest - Sharing of diverse perspectives and production of objects commissioned by the mandate.
3. Learner's community - Participation to the realization of a collective educational project.
4. Community of practice - Professional practice development through sharing knowledge among members of a professional community

We might define these concepts further by identifying examples of various thriving communities of librarians that are actively exchanging information and knowledge. A community of interest might be any of the boards or lists that spring up around a various topics. The goal-oriented community might be best exemplified by the LibSuccess wiki where librarians come together with the goal of creating links and best practice for various endeavors. The mandate is self-imposed across the group: let's make this the best it can be.

The learner's community might be found within the closed forums, boards and web-based classrooms of online LIS programs such as those at the University of Illinois or the University of North Texas. A class may come together, work on a common project, and then disband as the semester ends.

Finally, the Community of Practice might be best represented by the thriving biblioblogosphere, to use a word coined by Karen Schneider, librarian and blogger at the Free Range Librarian. Professionals meet online and carry out the work of creating new knowledge and forging new ground. Look at posts by The Shifted librarian, the Librarian in Black and others for examples of projects, new knowledge and insight. These innovators and commentators seek to build a strong community - as evidenced by the outcry when ALA president Michael Gorman dismissed the "blog people" in a recent commentary.

Research conducted within various types of virtual communities illustrates how diverse and broad these communities can be. Researchers have found communities based on almost any topic imaginable as well as those based on social activities such as image sharing (Flickr) and web bookmarks (Del.icio.us) All of these communities studied had certain common elements as well as their own unique flavor.

Another type of virtual community springs up during some virtual conferences. Participants in a virtual conference can be anywhere on the globe and still have access to notable speakers, their presentations, and those in-person conference activities and interactions found in the corridors and backs of the auditoriums by participating in chat rooms, forums and bulletin boards during the conference (Cakir, 2002). A virtual conference, the author points out, occurs without time constraints and scheduling. Each participant chooses their own convenient time to access the interaction.

In May 2005, the New England chapter of the American Society of Information Science and Technology staged a day long conference called Syndicate, Aggregate, Communicate: ?New Web Tools in Real Applications for Libraries, Companies and Regular Folk where participants and speakers, including this author, were encouraged to blog, post images to flickr and comment on the proceedings. Questions were even taken via IM for the panelists.

Building Successful Virtual Communities

In the arena of information technology and system design, online environments that are easy to browse and intuitively searchable are the goal for many practitioners who seek to create communities for communication/information exchange. It is also important that users are social and engaged.

Combining measures for sociability - the success of a virtual community - and usability, Jennifer Preece, Dean of  the College of Information Studies at the university of Maryland, in a 2001 study, determined some key factors to rating the success of a virtual community including determinants that pertain to how much social interaction occurs as well as those rooted in the usability of the system itself. An overview of Preece's determinants is presented below.

Preece's Determinants for Sociability and Usability of Virtual Communities

(Preece, 2001, p.350-352)

More Research, More Communities

The arena of online social interaction is rich territory for further research. Notable researchers and scholars continue to publish and examine virtual communities, pointing to the future in their recent works. Burnett concludes his typology of information exchange in virtual communities article noting that virtual communities are not only a place for social interaction online but also information neighborhoods rich with participants, where future studies may test and redefine the typology to provide further knowledge.

Budding collaborative technologies such as blogs (Blanchard, 2004) and wikis (Ciffolilli, 2003), Web sites created by multiple authors in an encyclopedic format, offer new cyberspaces to apply and test theories. In peer-reviewed journals, however, blogs receive less coverage. Blogger and Rochester Institute of Technology professor, Elizabeth Lawley's post (2004) on Web log research issues identifies five approaches to studying blogs including study of the form itself, study of interactions between blogs and blog authors, ethnographic studies of blog clusters and communities, analysis of the content and style used in Web logs, and study of the use of Web logs as tools in specific organizational contexts. These are intriguing avenues ripe for research and study.

Newer bodies of research, such as social informatics (Kling, 2000), defined as the study of the use of information technologies in a cultural or organizational context (p.245), approach the virtual community as a sociotechnical environment that thrives when participants interact in an engaged learning atmosphere supported by various information technologies (Kling & Courtright, 2003).

Baker and A. Ward (2002) urge researchers to examine the sense of space and distance in virtual environments such as private chat rooms, firewalls and how citizens interact, limits of the physical infrastructure of the Internet and its effect on virtual communities, and the fact that wireless devices will change the way users may interact online when they no longer have to be tied to one location to connect.

Rheingold, cited so often by scholars in articles about virtual communities, echoes these ideas and the connection to real life social interaction in his 2002 book Smart Mobs, pondering where new technologies will take us. Smart mobs, a recent off-shoot of interaction online, are planned events created by those "who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other" (p. xii) by using networked devices such as cell phones, PDAs and laptops. This shift in technology is another milestone and grounds for more research:
 

The Internet is what happened when a lot of computers started communicating. The computer and the Internet were designed, but the way people use them were not designed into either technology, nor were the world-shifting uses of these tools anticipated by their designers or vendors….as more people use mobile telephones, more chips communicate with each other, more computers know where they are located, more technology becomes wearable, more people start using these new media to invent new forms of sex, commerce, entertainment, communion and, as always, conflict. (p. 182) 

A Bibliography of Virtual Community Research

Bieber, M., Engelbart, D., Furata, R., Hiltz, S. R., Noll, J., Preece, J., et al. (2002). Toward virtual community knowledge evolution. Journal of Management Information Systems, 18(4), 11-35.

Blanchard, A. (2004). Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the  Julie/Julia Project. Retrieved October 1, 2004, from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html

Burnett, G. (2000). Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology. Retrieved August 31, 2004, 2004, from http://informationr.net/ir/5-4/paper82.html

Cakir, A. E. (2002). Virtual communities - a virtual session on virtual conferences. Behaviour & Information Technology, 21(5), 365-371.

Ciffolilli, A. (2003). Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of embers in virtual communities: the case of wikipedia. Retrieved September 21, 2004, from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/index.html

De Cindio, F., Gentile, O., Grew, P., & Redolfi, D. (2003). Community networks: Rules of behavior and social structure. The Information Society (19), 395-406.

Driskell, R. B., & Lyon, L. (2002). Are virtual communities true communities? Examining the environments and elements of community. City & Community, 1(4), 373-390.

Ellis, D., Oldridge, R., & Vasconcelos, A. (2004). Community and virtual community. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 38, 145-186. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Henri, F., & Pudelko, B. (2003). Understanding and analysing activity and learning in virtual communities. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (19), 474-487.

Kling, R. (2000). Social informatics: A new perspective on social research about information and communication technologies. Prometheus, 18(3), 245-264.

Kling, R., & Courtright, C. (2003). Group behavior and learning in electronic forums: A sociotechnical approach. The Information Society (19), 221-235.

Lawley, E. (2004). Blog research issues. Retrieved September 28, 2004, from http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/06/24/blog_research_issues.php

Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities: determining and measuring success. Behaviour & Information Technology, 20(5), 347-356.

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: HarperPerennial.

Rheingold, H. (2002). Smart Mobs The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing.

Ruhleder, K. (2002). Understanding on-line community: the affordances of virtual space. Retrieved September 21, 2004, from http://InformationR.net/ir/7-3/paper132.html

Sieckenius de Souza, C., & Preece, J. (2004). A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities. Interacting with Computers(16), 579-610.

Ward, K. J. (1999). Cyber-ethnography and the emergence of the virtually new community. Journal of Information Technology (14), 95-105.

Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999). Net surfers don't ride alone: Virtual communities as communities. Retrieved September 24, 2004, from http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/netsurfers/netsurfers.pdf

Wilson, S. M., & Peterson, L. C. (2002). The anthropology of online communities. Annual Revue of Anthropology, 31, 449-467.

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