Tues Jan 26 4-5:30, 402 Barrows  **note change of place from last
semester**

Putting Working Document Collections Online

     Lucy Suchman, Xerox PARC
     suchman@parc.xerox.com


The Carquinez Bridge Replacement Project is a civil engineering initiative
within the California Department of  Transportation (Caltrans), charged
with the design of a replacement bridge over the Carquinez Straits at the
north  end of the San Francisco Bay. For the past two years I and my
colleagues in the Work Practice & Technologyarea at Xerox PARC have been
engaged in a collaborative research effort with engineers in the Carquinez
Project  group, focussed on a collection of documents called the
engineering project files. Together we're exploring what it would mean to
create an electronic version of the files, currently maintained on paper
in three ring binders.

     The project files are an instance of what we've termed working
document collections, occupying a niche between  the active documents on
one's desktop and those stored in an archive. Project files are maintained
by every project team at Caltrans, and comprise a kind of cumulative
documentary record of a given engineering project.
     The documents in the files are extremely heterogeneous, ranging from
standard business correspondence to quite specialized charts, maps and
other exhibits tied to the particular requirements of civil engineering.
Documents are  filed according to the Caltrans Uniform Filing System, a
hierarchically arranged set of categories designed roughly  to map the
chronological course of a project. Our intervention is aimed at defining
the work practice and technology requirements for migrating the project
files from paper to digital media, integrated with Caltrans'  developing
intranet. Our approach is to require minimal overhead for putting
documents into the collection, while providing opportunities for
arbitrarily extensible, iterative, and modifiable document coding, and
multiple strategies  for document retrieval.

     In this talk I'll describe the particular interests of the project
files, of working document collections, and of our  current project as
part of an ongoing research agenda in work-oriented design.



     Lucy Suchman received a Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology from
the University of California at Berkeley in  1984. Since 1979 she has been
a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where she is currently a
Principal Scientist and head the Work Practice and Technology area, a
multidisciplinary research group. In addition to her position at Xerox
PARC, she am an affiliate researcher at the Center for the Study of
Language and Information at Stanford University and at the Institute for
Research on Learning in Palo Alto, as well as a  Consulting Associate
Professor in Stanford University's Symbolic Systems Program. She served as
Program Chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work in 1988, and for the first
 Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems in 1990. She was a
founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and
served on its Board of Directors from 1982-1990. Her dissertation    Plans
and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication was
published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. It provides a critical
analysis of models of human action and communication that  underlie the
design of interactive machines, and proposes an alternative perspective
drawn from recent   developments in the social sciences. Her current
research concerns the relation of ethnographies of everyday    practice to
new technology design.