Bryan says:
So I'm not sure of one thing, here. What's the difference between an info commons located on a campus, and the idea of an information commons for, well, humanity? How to carve out the local digital-information sphere? I reply:
Yeah, this is a very worthwhile question. Maybe "difference between" isn't the important thing, and "mapping between" is more the issue. Is there any productive sense in which a campus InfoCommons is a microcosm of the big InfoCommons in the sky? I'm thinking of the student-on-a-campus, and his/her need to be able to GET TO the requisite resources (digital and otherwise, multimedia and single-medium) and to then DO productive things with the materials, and so CREATE content. In the on-campus case a lot of the 'property' issues that bedevil Lessig et al. are in practise finessed via constrain-to-domain/fair-use strategies and assumptions, but the problems of (a) support for people's activities, (b) inculcation of RESPONSIBILITY for words and actions, (c) means to link locally-produced content to the emerging global digital library... those things aren't being very well handled on most campuses. I guess I'm thinking of the campus InfoCommons as a locus for innovation via the efficient juxtaposition of expertise and info access --though most of the users most of the time wouldn't be innovating, just doing their work. That's a lot like the global Information Commons, in which most activity is pedestrian surfing (or worse), but the glorious prospect is that some people WILL find/create ways to do new things if the resources are 'free' in the Commons sense. I guess one might think of the campus InfoCommons as the sandbox in which people learn to play with others (a friend of mine characterized a sandbox at Stanford's married student housing complex as "Hobbes' Bog", the War of All Against All).

Another bit to add: what a user brings to the InfoCommons is partly private info, like the contents of his/her network drives, the contents of his/her wetware. The Commons is a place to get help with engineering the private stuff into communication, some or all of which may be made accessible to wider audiences. This user has access to stuff that's at the intermediate and local level, like material on class pages or in locally-held collections and isn't on the Web or in the global InfoCommons.

...and continuing, following up Bryan's suggestion that of analysis "campus social life of information" should be a centerpiece of what I said about "discovery process matters":

"Campus social life of information" is just it. This is so much more satisfying to me than the pallid "self study" that administrator types seem so fond of, because it emphasizes _analysis_ of a specific something. We really don't know what we should of how our various constituencies actually use the information accessible to them, how much, and to do what...

As we say in anthropology, it's all data...

Anyway, the problem seems to me to be: who On any given campus) is going to DO the participant-observation and data-munching to assess the state of the campus social life of information? And how do we convince people that it should be treated as a problematic, something to be looked into, monitored, taken into consideration? Is anybody DOING this anywhere? And permit me to doubt it, but then there are lots of things that people aren't doing anywhere, having as they do JOBS that eat up their time. Being on sabbatical is at the same time very good for me and productive of very bad habits of intellectual self-indulgence...