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To describe lessons learned about the process of designing effective tasks for digital library user tests.

Illustrated examples are drawn from eight separate user tests run over the course of three years during development of Variations2, the Indiana University digital music library.

Four major considerations for effective task design are described and illustrated. Areas explored include iterative task development, design of authentic activities, recruitment of authentic users and how to deal with unrealistic testing scenarios.

Lessons learned in task design are matched with examples that illustrate how to balance real‐world constraints with ideal testing conditions to gather useful results.

User tests that consider a balance between real‐world constraints and ideal conditions are more apt to provide useful design ideas for complex systems such as digital libraries. Practitioners may use these guidelines to develop and run their own effective user tests.

This study aims to examine the forms of information about the synthesis of life forms in the public sphere.

A document‐oriented approach was used and a wide range of documents that discuss a particular technoscientific issue was sampled. The analysis of documents involved a combination of discourse and content analysis.

The study demonstrates that there is a significant growth of the diversity of document types over time. Overall, 24 document types and 21 publication formats were identified. Web‐based formats, such as blogs and news and information web sites, play a prominent role in the dissemination of information about the synthesis of life forms.

The variety of document types identified here expands current understanding of the public documentary landscape and shows that the analysis of technoscientific debates and controversies can no longer be limited to traditional mass media documents such as news, feature articles, and editorials. However, a larger sample that includes more documents as well as non‐textual objects, such as images or even lab specimens, would expand the scope of this taxonomy and make conclusions more definitive. Further research into the specific digital types of documents identified in the study and their impact on the communication of scientific information to the public is needed.

Surveying and understanding the kinds of documents that circulate information about emerging technoscientific issues can help to provide better services for a variety of information users and develop better tools for access and dissemination of such information.

The study demonstrates that a document‐oriented approach can provide valuable insight into the circulation of information about science in the public sphere. It also offers an elaborate taxonomy of documents that can be used in further research as well as in information and science literacy instruction.