Bonnie Nardi
Bonnie Nardi is best known as the lead author of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, Nardi & O'Day, (MIT Press, 1998). She is widely known among librarians - especially research, reference and digital librarians - for Chapter 7 of Information Ecologies, which focused on librarians as keystone species in information ecologies.
Nardi's book inspired the title of a UK conference Information Ecologies: the impact of new information 'species' [1] hosted, inter alia, by the UK Office of Library Networking, now known by its acronym UKOLN, and led to a keynote address by Nardi at a 1998 Library of Congress Institute on Reference Service in a Digital Age [2].
Bonnie Nardi is currently a member of the faculty of the School of Information & Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. She had written Information Ecologies while a researcher at ATT Labs Research.
Nardi's self-described theoretical orientation is "activity theory, a philosophical framework developed by the Russian psychologists Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, and their students. My interests are user interface design, collaborative work, computer-mediated communication, and theoretical approaches to technology design and evaluation." She is currently conducting a study of blogging.
See also Bonnie Nardi's home page, information ecology, information species, digital library, digital librarian.