The Digital Water Education Library collection (DWEL) is being generated by primary and secondary school teachers in the United States. This complex process involves both individual research and team design, and the use of a variety of online tools, such as an online cataloguing tool. Interactions amongst DWEL members are being ethnographically analysed in order to identify requirements for further development of these tools. The analysis suggests that many DWEL members envision their work as occurring in an integrated environment with stable documents, a situation which is not supported by the current configuration of DWEL tools. The design implications of these findings are reviewed.