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Humanities Scholars. Technology and the search for Primary Sources. A Little Inspiration…. What are Primary Sources?. Where are they found?. Archives Museums Special Libraries Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Seeking Primary Sources. Sources may be difficult to find,
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Humanities Scholars Technology andthe search for Primary Sources
Where are they found? • Archives • Museums • Special Libraries Image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Seeking Primary Sources • Sources may be difficult to find, • May be located far away, requiring travel, • May be improperly stored, and • Information may not be well organized.
How do humanities scholars seek? • Duff and Johnson (2002) wrote about historians in archives: • 4 types of activities emerge: • Orienting themselves to archives, finding aids, sources and collections. • Seeking known material. • Building contextual knowledge • Identifying relevant material.
Still seeking… • Meho and Tibbo revisited Ellis’ work in 2003, to see if emerging technology would impact his 6 activities. • They found 4 new activities: accessing, verifying, networking, and information management. • They propose a new model of information seeking behavior, combining these 10 activities into 4 stages: searching, accessing, processing, and ending.
Does Technology change this? • Wendy Shaw in 2001 observed that technology use among English scholars was limited to word processing and email. • Marcia Bates (2001) concluded that new technology wasn’t as prevalent among humanities scholars. • As recently as 2008, Tahir, Mahmood, and Shafique found that arts and humanities teachers still preferred print books and articles over electronic resources.
What does this mean for libraries? • We still need better classification within collections, but…. • Museums, archives, special collections all continue to include more primary source material in electronic format. • Digitized editions of print material are more readily available. • High-resolution images of artifacts are available on museum websites.
Bibliography • Anderson, Ian G. (2004). Are You Being Served? Historians and the Search for Primary Sources. Archivaria, 58, pp. 81-128. • Bates, Marcia J. (2001). Information Needs and Seeking of Scholars and Artists in Relation to Multimedia Materials. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/scholars.html • Duff, W. M & Johnson, C. A. (2002). Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives. The Library Quarterly, Vol. 72:4, pp.472-496. • Meho, Lokman I. & Tibbo, Helen R. (2003). Modeling the Information-Seeking Behavior of Social Scientists: Ellis’s Study Revisited. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 54:6, pp. 570-587
Bibliography continued • Shaw, Wendy (2001) The use of the Internet by academics in the discipline of English literature: a quantitative and qualitative approach. Information Research Vol 6:2. http://informationr.net/ir/6-2/ws8.html • Tahir M., Mahmood K., & Shafique F. (2008). Information Needs and Information-Seeking Behaviors of Arts and Humanities Teachers: A Survey of the University of Punjab. Library Philosophy and Practice. Published on the web at: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/tahir-mahmood-shafique.htm • Tibbo, Helen R. (2002). Primarily History: Historians and the Search for Primary Source Materials. International Conference on Digital Libraries, 2002, pp. 1-10.