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.
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.*
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
* 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-40 2007 (in press)
 Keep updated on new information concepts
These future plans will continue to take into
account multiple elements that go into successful
web design and create articulation work.
Another Example of Articulation Work
Designing for Diversity:
Where Local and Network Perspectives Meet
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.
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.
 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.
.
Site Local Identity
Via Home Page
Web
Review
WG
Site Network Identity
Via SiteDB
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 longterm ecological information management”.