In this talk Howard Besser will outline a series of studies he performed on the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project  (MESL) -- the first large-scale multi-institution digital image distribution experiment.  For each study, he will discuss study results, methodology, and the pragmatic constraints that inhibited "by-the-book" research design.  Finally, he will make some observations about trying to study new and complex systems like digital libraries.  (The full text of his MESL studies, generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, can be found at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/)
 

Howard Besser is Associate Professor at UCLA's School of Education & Information Studies, where he teaches and does research on the social and cultural effects of information technology, mutimedia, image databases, and digital ibraries.  He was a founder of the MESL Project, served on its Management Committee, and was Principal Investigator for a series of Mellon Foundation sponsored studies of the Project.