Historians' use of digital archival collections: The web, historical scholarship, and archival research

Abstract

This article reports a research study about historians' experiences using digital archival collections for research articles that they published in the American Historical Review. We contacted these authors to ask about their research processes, with regard to digital archival collections, and their perceptions of the usefulness of digital archival collections to historical research. This study presents a realistic portrayal of the “uses” and “impacts” of digital primary sources from the perspectives of historians who use digital collections for their research projects. The findings from this study indicate that digital archival collections are important source materials for historical studies for various reasons. However, the amount of authority digital materials possess as historical resources was disputed. Many historians preferred documents in their original form, but historians' preferences began to change as they increasingly consulted digital formats. As the web has developed into an important research platform, historians have adopted different research patterns, one of which is using random web searches to find digital primary sources. Historians' understandings of the “use” of digital archival collections revealed a spectrum of activities including finding, understanding, interpreting, and citing digital information. Historians in this study worked concurrently on multiple studies or on a larger project for a book, and each of their searches for digital collections had the potential to provide them with useful results for several research studies.

Information Competencies of Historians as Archive Users: A Slovenia/UK Comparison

“…They saw drawbacks and benefits in technology: drawbacks are mentioned in connection to poor quality of images, lack of diversity, non-searchability; benefits mainly in easing searching and access, saving time, and having items universally available. This, and other studies, show an increasing reliance on general web search engines, to find resources, rather than archive-specific systems [9,26,33,34,35]. Sinn and Soares (2014) therefore conclude that digital project developers should try to make their entire collection database indexable by search engines [9].…”

“…These patterns appear not to have changed much in a decade, as Sinn & Soares noted that historians show similar information behaviors with digital collections [9]. Chassanoff claimed that it is not possible to identify from the literature which would be historians' preferred search and retrieval strategies in archival settings [8], However, she also found that historians' preferred ways of locating primary sources are finding aids, archivists and citation linking; the methods deemed most useful are not necessarily the most frequently used, due to experience, availability, etc.…”

“…Such studies have fallen into three groups [9]: materials/institution centred, focusing on materials used; product-centred, focusing on archival research results; and user-centred. This last group of studies, considering the characteristics, behaviour, competencies, etc.…”

“…Chasanoff also investigated academic historians, using a web survey, finding an awareness of, and interest in, new technological developments, the quality of digitized materials, and recognition of the archivists' expertise in the digital environment [8]. Sinn and Soares found that historians' sources of information about the existence of digital archival collections were mainly informal and personal [9].…”

Land Developers and Archaeological Information

“…A part of the question of the usefulness of information has been discussed extensively in information science research from the perspectives of information needs (Savolainen, 2017) and relevance (Saracevic, 2016) even if there is much less research on the topic in the context of use and perceived usefulness (for exceptions e.g. Madden et al, 2007;Soomai et al, 2011;Sinn & Soares, 2014) than assumptions and expressions of needs and the relevance of retrieved information. Usefulness and relevance are only a part of the broader question of the value or worth of information, but for the mainstream information science research aiming at understanding and facilitating information work, it is one of the key aspects of the issue (e.g.…”