Web and Internet technologies have traditionally been used to serve information across machines and among people. Recently, there has been a great deal of interest shown in using these information services to support digital libraries. Research in digital libraries is an interdisciplinary effort that must synthesize existing results from highly disparate fields. This paper examines two such contributing fields - information systems and orality-literacy studies - and applies them to a particular digital library domain, botanical taxonomic work. In trying to build digital libraries for botanical taxonomists, we show how two widely differing fields can each provide part of a solution neither can provide alone.