Accessing and Using Digital Libraries in Art History

Abstract

Over the past decades, the increase in the use of digital resources and the growth of research conducted in digital environments has transformed academic scholarship. The goal of this paper is to highlight the importance of understanding user behavior and needs for building digital libraries and resources that have a positive effect on the whole scholarly workflow. For this purpose, the art historical discipline will be used as a case study; by employing an ethnographic approach to the study of scholarly habits, we managed to uncover the requirements that scholars in the field have in terms of accessing and using digital libraries. The complex information behavior of art historians as well as the challenges they often face when interacting with digital resources make them a great example to demonstrate the impact that digital libraries and archives can have on the research process.

Partnering through Collections in Digital Humanities: Looking at Researchers’ Needs

“…Despite the progress that digitization initiatives have made over the years, as well as the increase in the availability of online material (especially secondary literature), art historians were found to lack digital access, particularly to primary resources and good-quality, openaccess visual material. [36] In fact, access problems perpetuated some of the habits of art historians noted in earlier studies, which are often associated with pre-digital or non-digital contexts, such as traveling to get access to particular types of primary resources. For example, scholars in certain areas of study, such as non-Western art, were found to face greater difficulty in finding the material needed for their projects online; unsurprisingly, the availability of digital resources on the Web tended to be greater in areas dealing with Western art of particular popular eras (e.g., the Renaissance, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European art).…”