The archetypes project deals as much with education as with library design. A good archetype library is an educational tool for students as well as a reference for practising programmers. A project at Caltech, called the etext project deals with using hypermedia and networking technology to support education based on archetypes.
One of the problems we had in this project was dealing with a multiplicity of target audiences. We have hopes that etext and archetypes can be used by high school students to develop parallel applications on networks of workstations and scientific supercomputers. We also want college students in the sciences and engineering to use it as a textbook. Finally, we want programmers who are beginning to use parallel machines, to use the document as a tool to help them obtain parallel implementations. Our hope is that the electronic medium will allow each type of user to employ the document in a manner suitable for that user. This turns out to be something of a problem depending on the technology used.
We have learned that the success of the archetypes project depends on whether the documentation can be used for education and for reference in a very simple way.