PurposeThe authors received a grant to develop a digital educational tool to facilitate student engagement with online primary sources. Students and faculty were interviewed prior to developing the tool's specifications to ensure a user‐centered focus. This research paper seeks to report the results of a user needs assessment that explored students' use of primary sources and their learning preferences, as well as faculty's pedagogical goals for student work with primary sources.Design/methodology/approachFaculty, graduate, and undergraduate students enrolled in humanities courses at the University of Colorado at Boulder were interviewed to help guide the development of this tool. The interview transcripts were analyzed to uncover several key findings.FindingsThe results of the user needs assessment suggest that primary sources have great potential to excite students' enthusiasm and enhance their learning experiences; however, these materials present several challenges that prevent students from using digital primary‐source collections to the fullest extent. Educational technology may be able to help students overcome these difficulties, but only if the technology is easy‐to‐use and designed to support faculty's pedagogical goals.Research limitations/implicationsThis study employed a semi‐structured interview methodology to collect the relevant data. Its central research questions could be explored in greater depth using other user‐centered design methodologies, such as artifact and task analyses.Practical implicationsThis research will be used to inform the development of a digital educational tool for student use with primary sources.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the growing body of research on user needs for effective work with online primary sources in university‐level humanities education.

The CIDOC-CRM standard indicates that common events, actors, places and timeframes are important in linking together cultural material, and provides a framework for describing them. However, merely describing entities in this way in two datasets does not yet interlink them. To do that, the identities of instances still need to be either reconciled, or be based on a shared vocabulary.The WW1LOD dataset presented in this paper was created to facilitate both of these approaches for collections dealing with the First World War. For this purpose, the dataset includes events, places, agents, times, keywords, and themes related to the war, based on over ten different authoritative data sources from providers such as the Imperial War Museum. The content is harmonized into RDF, and published as a Linked Open Data service.While generally basing on CIDOC-CRM, some modeling choices used also deviate from it where our experience dictated such. In the article, these deviations are discussed in the hope that they may serve as examples where CIDOC-CRM itself may warrant further examination.As a demonstration of use, the dataset and online service have been used to create a contextual reader application that is able link together and pull in information related to WW1 from e.g.

The topic of academic/research librarians with subject doctorates is largely unexplored in the literature, despite recent efforts to recruit them. Based on survey data gathered from non-LIS doctorate holders currently working in U.S. and Canadian academic/research libraries, this article highlights data and trends relating to these librarians, focusing on their demographic profile, educational background, paths into librarianship, and range of positions. It is important not only to provide vital information to the academic/research library community about these librarians as a distinct and potentially sought-after group but also to communicate their experiences to advanced-degree holders considering a career in librarianship.

The topic of academic/research librarians with subject doctorates remains largely unexplored. Based on survey data gathered from subject-doctorate holders (excluding those with doctorates in LIS) currently working in U.S. and Canadian academic/research libraries, this article extends the analysis published by the authors in the January 2008 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy. While the first article featured quantitative analysis to highlight data and trends relating to these librarians over a 40-year period, focusing on their demographic profile, educational background, paths into librarianship, and range of positions, this article analyzes qualitative data to report their perceptions about their work environment and the advantages and challenges of academic librarianship as a career. Providing more information about this group of librarians and their experiences highlights the valuable skills they bring to the academic/research library environment. Moreover, it can help advanced-degree holders to determine whether a career in librarianship is right for them.

Libraries Bibliography," which helped flesh out our literature 2 review. Everyone who contributed to the conversation about the ethics of teaching with digitized primary sources on Twitter,