With the advent of strategic science, multidisciplinary and cross-institutional research is more and more becoming the rule. The problems encountered by such multidisciplinary research and development cooperations are highly varied. They derive from multiple differences in the backgrounds of the participants and are often perceived as cultural gaps that need to be bridged for cooperation. The main argument of the article is that multidisciplinary collaborations have mechanisms at their disposal to cooperate despite multiple problems counteracting such a cooperation. Since symbolic communication is the primary medium of articulation across sites, this article focuses on how symbolic communication enables cooperation across sites without a deep comprehension of each other's work. Multidisciplinary cooperations start out with few shared symbolic resources, but as the cooperation continues, they may develop communicative boundarytranscending objects such as active and passive dictionaries and hybrid repertoires.Engineer: . . . we use PDA in water. Somebody: What is PDA? Engineer: Polydiacetyleen, one of the simplest substances to draw in a zigzag line. Chemist: Sure, they are simple to draw, but by no means simple to synthesize.

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Abstract. As current digital libraries are becoming more complex, the facilities provided by them will increase and the difficulty of learning associated with the complexity of using these facilities will also increase. In order to produce usable and useful interactive systems, designers need to ensure that good design features are incorporated into the systems, taking into consideration end-users' needs and cultural backgrounds. We carried out a study to investigate useful design features digital libraries should have. The study provides insights on the usability impact of digital libraries for task completion and end-users' perceived impressions on the effectiveness of the digital libraries. The results also suggest that there is little provision on the interface to cater to end-users' browsing and inter-cultural needs. Hence, this paper also discusses design guidelines for the design of user-centred digital libraries.

Computing metaphors have become an integral part of information systems design, yet they are deeply rooted in cultural practices. This paper presents an investigation of the cross-cultural use and usability of such metaphors by studying the library metaphor of digital libraries in the cultural context of the Maori, the indigenous population of New Zealand. The ethnographic study examines relevant features of the Maori culture, their form of knowledge transfer and their use of physical and digital libraries. On this basis, the paper points out why and when the library metaphor fails Maori and other indigenous users, and indicates how this knowledge can contribute to the improvement of future designs.

This paper provides a brief overview of cross-cultural interface design solutions combining cross-language information retrieval and crosscultural designing. Language is a part of culture in a sense, but most of researchers deal with these two issues separately because they have many different issues and solutions in nature. The diversity of sources and perspectives taken into account for the review including practitioners'(software localization) and technical (e.g. semantic web, ontologies) solutions, design processes (e.g. cultural finger print), design elements (e.g. cultural markers), and philosophically informed discussions (e.g. semiotics).