Information Seeking Behaviours in the Digital Age: UK
Historians and the Search for Primary Sources
This paper
presents the results of the first phase of a unique international project: Primarily History:
Historians and the Search for Primary Material. This project is exploring how historians locate primary research
materials in the digital age and what they are teaching their students about finding research materials.
To date, there is very little evidence regarding the use and efficacy of archival electronic access tools. Indeed, there has never even been a study of the use and efficacy of finding aids in paper form or how researchers use them. While we do not yet know a great deal about how researchers navigate archives and their resources we know even less about how they search for primary research materials and locate repositories, collections, and finding guides since the advent of the Web and developments such as EAD (Encoded Archival Description SGML DTD (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language Document Type Definition). As those in the cultural heritage community and beyond seek to develop further frameworks for enhancing and integrating access (such as OAIS (Open Archives Initiative System) and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) there is a pressing need to take into account users' information seeking behaviours. If in the future, as Conway suggests, we can or will only preserve what is used in
Although concentrating on historians the project's sampling techniques, methodology and preliminary findings raise questions for all humanists who seek digital or analogue material through online, print or informal methods and are responsible for teaching and mentoring students to do likewise.
Results are presented from a survey of 800 historians researching and teaching history in UK higher education. Dr. Helen Tibbo of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is conducting a parallel survey of historians and in the US. This paper presents results from the UK strand of the study. Historians are just one, and often not the largest, group who use archives and repositories but in many cases they are the most respected. Many archivists and curators see scholars as their most important customers because of their published research and because they are training the next generation of researchers. Thus, historians are the focus of this study but literary, music, theatre, film, television scholars, genealogists, or secondary students might just as easily be, and probably should be in future studies.
In recent years there have been a limited studies of humanists’ use of technology <6,10,12,13>. Wiberley and Jones <14,15,16> have studied a group of humanists and their information technology use over time and Andersen <1> has looked specifically at how historians use technologies such as websites for their teaching. Some research has studied the information seeking behaviour of humanists, <30> but few studies have explored how historians look for materials <11>. No one has yet to explore how historians look for archival collections since the advent of electronic finding aids (in particular the EAD) <5,8,9>.