Document Centered Design

I was just reading “Consolidated Assessment: A user-research approach which integrates our best tools into a single session” on B&A. (Excellent idea and good article). As I was reading, I found myself, again, trying to think of how to mix some of these UCD methods in with the more document centered methods that drive some digital library projects.

It seems like a number of projects sort of start out like this:
We have this nice collection of photos/documents/moon rocks — lets scan ‘em and put ‘em on the web.
or
we have this interesting IR algorithm/data visualization technique we’d like to try — somebody get me some I to R and let’s put it on the web.

Alright, that might be oversimplifying and I don’t mean to belittle any of these projects, but the genesis of most make it difficult to introduce the users’ needs and goals early in the development cycle. So, how do we go about marrying some of the better UCD techniques with such document centered approaches?