Historians and Their Information Sources

Abstract

This article reports on a survey of historians and a citation analysis undertaken to revisit the questions treated in Margaret F. Stieg’s 1981 article published in College & Research Libraries. It examines which materials historians consider to be the most important and how they discover them. Their attitudes toward and use of electronic materials were also studied. Many characteristics of historians’ information needs and use have not changed in a generation: informal means of discovery like book reviews and browsing remain important, as does the need for comprehensive searches. Print continues to be the principal format. What has changed is that the advent of electronic resources has increased historians’ use of catalogs and indexes in their efforts to identify appropriate primary and secondary sources of information.

Library and information resources and users of digital resources in the humanities

“…As the RePAH team have argued, most humanities users distrust pre-culled or pre-analysed collections, and prefer to make their own decisions about the data that they find, from extensive resource collections (Brown et al, 2007: p.22). A similar preference for recall over precision was noted in historians by Dalton and Charnigo (2004) archives. Instead they, and the web resources that they produce, may now be an aid to further resource discovery.…”

“…Bates' work and that of Dalton and Charnigo (2004) and Whitmire (2002) has also shown that those humanities scholars who use digital resources tend to be demanding of the quality of resources and are capable of constructing complex search strategies, given appropriate training.…”

“…Most recently there has been a move to study the work of researchers in specific disciplines, Talja and Maula (2003), and Ellis and Oldman, (2005) have studied literary researcher, and Dalton and Charnigo, (2004) Anderson (2004) and Duff and her colleagues those in History. (Duff and Cherry, 2001) (Duff et al, 2004) These authors argue that the information behaviour of scholars in individual disciples is sufficiently different that it ought to be a discrete object of study, and that to study the humanities in general risks over generalisation.…”

Historical ethnobotany: an overview of selected studies

“…The iconographic sources included paintings, illustrations, sculptures, ceramics and other objects. In terms of mediation, the sources were classified as primary when they provided direct information about the object of study without mediation (Dalton and Charnigo 2004), regardless of whether the original records or the transcripts were primary or secondary. The types of primary written sources were classified as official documents (e.g., issued by former government agencies, kingdoms), manuscripts (e.g., codices, written literature, religious books and diaries and writings of travellers, naturalists and historians) and letters (unofficial writing directed to others) and prescriptions (medical or cooking prescriptions).…”

Technological Devices in the Archives: A Policy Analysis

“…This work has also further delineated the types of sources that scholars use for data and evidence-noting a strong distinction between primary sources and secondary sources [2,4,6,7,15,17]. Research in this vein has also explored topic selection [4] and how researchers search for and locate sources in physical and digital environments [1,2,3,6,7,8,9,14,15,17].…”