Historians and the use of primary source materials in the digital age

American Archivist

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 458-480

  Chassanoff, Alexandra ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

Digital Environment; Local History Collections; Online Collections

Indexed keywords

EID: 84888616014     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.76.2.lh76217m2m376n28     Document Type: Article

References (53)

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3. Helen Tibbo, "Primarily History in America: How U.S. Historians Search for Primary Materials at the Dawn of the Digital Age," The American Archivist 66, no. 1 (2003): 9-50;
4. Ian Anderson, "Are You Being Served Historians and the Search for Primary Sources," Archivaria 58 (2004): 88-129;
5. Wendy Duff and Catherine Johnson, "Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives," Library Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2002): 472-96;
6. Wendy Duff, Barbara Craig, and Joan Cherry, "Finding and Using Archival Resources: A Cross-Canada Survey of Historians Studying Canadian History," Archivaria 58 (2004).
7. See Donghee Sinn, "Impact of Digital Archival Collections on Historical Research," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, no. 8 (2012): 1521-37.
8. Sinn evaluated the impact of digital archival collection use by historians solely through the measurement of citations in academic history journals.
9. While useful for quantifying usage statistics, such an approach does not shed light on the information-seeking behavior of historians working with digitized archival materials.
10. Christine Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), 262.
11. Sue Stone, "Humanities Scholars: Information Needs and Uses," Journal of Documentation 38, no. 4 (1982): 297.
12. Stone, "Humanities Scholars: Information Needs and Uses"; American Council of Learned Societies, Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (New York, 2006).
13. Stone, "Humanities Scholars: Information Needs and Uses," 294-95.
14. William Brockman, Laura Neumann, Carole Palmer, and Tonyia Tidline, Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment (Washington, D.C.: Digital Library Federation and Council on Library and Information Resources, 2002), 11.
15. Oya Rieger, "Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age: The Role and Influence of Information and Communication Technologies" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2010).
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18. Brockman et al., Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment, 7.
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21. Stone, "Humanities Scholars," 296.
22. Donald Case, "The Collection and Use of Information by Some American Historians: A Study of Motives and Methods," The Library Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1991): 71.
23. Charles Cole, "Information Acquisition in History PhD Students: Inferencing and the Formation of Knowledge Structures," The Library Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1998): 42.
24. Jennifer Rumer and Roger C. Schonfeld, "Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians: Final Report from ITHAKA S+R," (2012), 11, http://www.sr.ithaka.org/sites/default/files/reports/supporting-the- changing-research-practices-of-historians.pdf.
25. Kirklin Bateman, Sheila Brennan, Douglas Mudd, and Paula Petric, "Taking a Byte Out of the Archives: Making Technology Work for You," Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 43, no. 1 (2005);
26. Richard J. Cox, "Machines in the Archives: Technology and the Coming Transformation of Archival Reference," First Monday 12, no. 11 (2007);
27. Lisa Miller, Stephen K. Galbraith, and RLG Working Group, "Capture and Release": Digital Cameras in the Reading Room (Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research 2010), http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/ 2010/2010-05.pdf.
28. Case, "The Collection and Use of Information by Some American Historians," 74.
29. Fredric Miller, "Use, Appraisal, and Research: A Case Study of Social History," The American Archivist 49, no. 4 (1981): 381.
30. Duff, Craig, and Cherry, "Finding and Using Archival Resources," 59.
31. Tibbo, "Primarily History in America," 21.
32. Beattie, "An Archival User Study," 42.
33. Margaret Stieg-Dalton and Laurie Charnigo, "Historians and Their Information Sources," College and Research Libraries 65, no. 4 (2004): 407;
34. Wendy Duff, Barbara Craig, and Joan Cherry, "Historians Use of Archival Sources: Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Age," The Public Historian 26, no. 2 (2004): 14.
35. Anderson, "Are You Being Served," 95;
36. Duff and Johnson, "Accidentally Found on Purpose," 472-96.
37. Weiyin Hong, James Thong, Wai-man Wong, and Kar-yan Tam, "Determinants of User Acceptance of Digital Libraries: An Empirical Examination of Individual Differences and System Characteristics," Journal of Management Information Systems 18, no. 3 (2002): 99.
38. Jane Segal and Lisa Spiro, "The Impact of Digital Resources on Humanities Research," Rice University, Fondren Library (2007), http://library.rice.edu/services/dmc/about/projects/the-impactof-digital- resources-on-humanities-research/.
39. Claire Warwick, Melissa Terras, Paul Huntington, and Nikoleta Pappa, "If You Build It Will They Come The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data," Literary and Linguistic Computing 23, no. 1 (2007): 99.
40. Diane Harley et al., Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2006), 2-1, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8c43w24h.
41. Laura Sheble and Barbara Wildemuth, "Transaction Logs," in Applications of Social Research Methods to Questions in Information and Library Science
42. Barbara Wildemuth (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2009), 174.
43. Onno Boonstra, Leen Breure, and Peter Doorn, "Past, Present, and Future of Historical Information Science," Historical Social Research 29 (Amsterdam: Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information, 2004), 91.
44. The survey questions needed to be adapted significantly to accurately capture the current scholarly research environment.
45. For example, Google did not exist in 2001.
46. See Appendix for survey instrument.
47. The following mail lists were selected: H-AFRO AM, H-Amstdy, H-Memory, H-POL, H-Public, H-South, H-Survey, H-US1918-45, H-USA, and H-Women.
48. The Carnegie Basic Classification scheme provides a useful means for capturing the institutional diversity of universities.
49. Institutions are classified through a series of attributes, including research output, size, focus, and geographical location, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, "Classification Description," http://classifications.carnegiefoundation.org/descriptions/basic.php.
50. The survey closing date was December 1, 2011.
51. Institutions were mapped and categorized using the Society of American Archivists' overview of repository types, http://www2.archivists.org/ usingarchives/typesofarchives.
52. Each respondent could report on use of multiple institutions of the same type (e.g., if Respondent X used
53. Types of government archives, their frequency of use was reported as 3).