LTER IM Articulation Work: Developing Community Web Recommendations Nicole Kaplan (SGS), Karen Baker (CCE, PAL), Barbara Benson (NTL), Eda Melendez-Colom (LUQ), Corinna Gries (CAP), and Jim Laundre (ARC) Background IM Working Group Formed to Develop Recommendations in Response to Challenges of First Generation Web Sites: Challenges: Data Accessibility and Usability Site Navigation Network Identity Communication of Research News Web technology and content categories evolve * This working group will continue to review and update recommendations to accommodate changes in technology and delivery mechanisms, as well as conceptual understandings, organizational categories, social perspectives, community elements, and synthesis strategies. Group’s Efforts are an Example of Articulation Work: IM Working Group Developed Recommendations with explicit elaboration and attention to alignment of multiple elements. Surveyed IM community to qualify user input Identified User Audiences, which addresses social and organizational elements of web site design. Shared successful navigational and organizational components of LTER web sites, which recognizes successful technical and organizational elements of web site design. Recommended categories of information to contain similar content from site to site, which includes social and organizational elements of web sites design. Created design elements and links that represent the site as part of a network, which have community and technical elements.. Future Plans of this Working Group to Perform Articulation Work: Explore the Site Description Directory (SiteDB) as a portal to standardized data, metadata and other information and to content organized content uniformly Explore links to standardized personnel, climate, bibliographic, etc. information via other all-site databases managed by Network office Explore data discovery using EML and Metacat query tools Keep updated on new web technologies Keep updated on new information concepts What is Articulation Work? Articulation work is described as work that enables other work such as within a task, within a project, or across organizational entities. Articulation work refers to the interrelating of parts or the alignment of work elements, often involving a range of planning, coordinating, and negotiating efforts. Over the past year or two this group has worked to align a set of social, technical and organizational elements.* Another Example of Articulation Work Designing for Diversity: Where Local and Network Perspectives Meet The figure above is the LTER Site Profiles page, the portal into the LTER Site Description Directory. The figure to the left illustrates the parallel development of site and Network Web Pages and represents a type of articulation work. This approach recognizes both local and standardized practices as valid and as contributing to system development. Note, plans for a periodic review of the web recommendations is key to establishing both an expectation of change and a process for change. Site Local Identity Via Home Page Site Network Identity Via SiteDB Web Review WG Local Perspective Network Perspective * See ASM Poster Millerand and Baker, Research in Infrastructure Studies: Social & Organizational Perspectives on Ecological Data Management; Baker and Millerand, Articulation Work Supporting Information Infrastructure Design. HICSS (in press) Karasti and Baker (2004) describe “three interdependent elements of science, data and technology for which information management provides support” and “the articulation work through which they [IMs] engage in balancing the tensions between the often-contradictory prerequisites inherent to long- term ecological information management”. These future plans will continue to take into account multiple elements that go into successful web design and create articulation work.