Designing digital library resources for users in sparse, unbounded social networks.

This paper presents evidence that communities of digital library users may be best described as ‘sparse, ill-defined' social networks, and argues that many of the digital library projects and systems described in the literature make the (possibly incorrect) assumption that their user populations are dense, well defined populations. This paper is unique in applying concepts from the field of social network analysis to issues in digital library design, and has opened up the possibility of a new approach to the analysing the users of digital library systems.