Investigating the potential uptake of e-research within a social science discipline: socio-technical issues within library & information science

We present preliminary findings from a case study of a social science collaborative project involving professionals, faculty members and graduate students. Employing actor-network theory to inform the use of interviews and text analysis, we studied the interplay between socio-technical aspects of work organization and the activities of the actors. Although the study is at an initial stage, we report three main findings: the low level of institutional support was compensated by high autonomy of action and expertise of project members; an artifact had consequences for collocated and remote collaboration; the lack of institutional intellectual property ownership provided flexibility. We conclude that the case shows how e-research and virtual research environments can benefit graduate students, professionals and non-elite researchers, who may have fewer opportunities to travel and engage in research work together