EVERY BOOK IS THE PRODUCT of an immense effort. This book would never have been begun, and could not have been completed, without the support, encouragement, and involvement of many people.
I owe an immense debt to my (now former) colleagues at Xerox PARC, with whom and from whom I learned so much about documents, work practice and life. Brian Smith, Geoff Nunberg, Lucy Suchman, John Seely Brown, Dan Brotsky, Cathy Marshall, Richard Southall, and Ken Olson were wonderful co-conspirators in the quest to make sense of documents. The members of the Work Practice and Technology Area (WPT) — Jeanette Blomberg, Gitti Jordan, Susan Newman, Julian Orr, Lucy Suchman, and Randy Trigg — gently tutored me in matters anthropological and taught me how a research group could operate democratically and compassionately
Thanks too to the many people who read portions of this manuscript in various stages of its development: Allyson Carlyle, Ewan Clayton, Paul Duguid, Margaret Hedstrom, Carl Lagoze, Marc Lesser, Cathy Marshall, Andreas Paepcke, Richard Southall, Lucy Suchman, Nancy Van House, David Weinberger, Zari Weiss, and Alice Wilder-Hall (who also provided editorial assistance).
Many thanks to my agent, Eileen Cope, for her encouragement and tireless efforts; to my editor and publisher, Dick Seaver, for his patient and gentle stewardship; to Greg Comer for his patience and meticulous attention to detail; and to Peter Finkelstein, Jack Lawrence, Jim Neafsey and Paul Roy for their masterful coaching.
I must also thank the two institutions that supported me during the researching and writing of this book: Xerox PARC and the Information School of the University of Washington. I am grateful to John Seely Brown (former director of PARC) and to Mike Eisenberg (dean of the Information School) for providing the space, literally and figuratively, in which the work could be done.
Finally, I have no adequate words to thank two people — Ewan Clayton and Zari Weiss — for their efforts in support of this book and their contributions to it. If selfless giving is a condition of entry into the world to come, they are both assured palaces in heaven.