"I was recently at a meeting of academics, digital librarians, and technologists, talking about the construction of usable specialized digital archives. The librarians and technologists told of constructing beautiful systems, with 24 different metadata fields and incredibly powerful search capabilities.

They also explained the “dirty secret” of many of these archives:

no one uses them.

The response from the group was a thoughtful one – academics from within the discipline should be included in the design process, so that the system fits their patterns of work, and conceptual categories, rather than being imposed based on some alien categorical scheme. Who could disagree? Nevertheless, I was struck by the similarity of the scene to a whole series of moments in the history of technology: moments where the experts dramatically misunderstood the likely patterns of use of a technology. The telephone was, famously, initially imagined as a one-to-many communications device, useful for weather reports distributed from a central source and the like. It found such use only in Albania.10 ATT predicted that cellphones would be used by a maximum of 900,000 people in the United States by the year 2000.11 The FCC’s prediction was lower. (Would that they had been correct!) Who predicted that IM would be a killer app, or imagined that e-mail would replace the phone call in much of corporate culture? Indeed, to go back to my earlier example, who predicted the explosion of the Web, or the extent to which people would rush to share knowledge, impressions, opinions – generally at some inconvenience to themselves and without monetary incentives to do so?"