Impact of digital archival collections on historical research

Sinn, Donghee

doi:10.1002/asi.22650

Cited by 35 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…Sinn's () study, which analyzes references in history journal articles from 2001 to 2010, presents the general patterns of digital archival collection usage. The impact of digital archival collections when compared with other source materials is not significant when judging by the frequency of citations, and the predominating source materials that historians use are secondary materials.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sinn

Soares

2014

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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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.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Sinn

Soares

2014

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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“…Sinn in [13] underlines that archival collections are constructed based on the archivists' appreciation of their value as documentary source rather than as a response to a direct user request, thus making harder for users the information search. Moreover the large set of digital data as well as its heterogeneity determine the generation of a large metadata database, which makes difficult the searching activity in information retrieval.…”

Section: B Archive Information Complexity: Semantic Visualization Fomentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics for the exploration of historical Business archives: Challenges and perspectives in the R.I.C.E.R.C.A. project

Martino¹,

Monti²,

Pastorino³

et al. 2013

2013 Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHeritage)

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The paper focuses on a Italian project funded by the European Commission with the objective of improving the capacity of archiving, cataloguing and accessing the cultural heritage represented by business historical archives. The approach identified is to enhance the level of description (semantics) of the data to develop strategies for digital cultural product consuming and marketing for a diverse audience and with different targets. The paper provides an overview of the project objectives and illustrates the issues to be faced, that have been identified in the initial phase. Strategies to address the relevant issues are discussed, taking into account the standard recommended by the historical archive community.

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“…11 Building upon his 2012 impact study, Sinn analyzes scholars' use of digital collections, drawing upon analysis of ten years of citations from the American Historical Review to map the usage of a diverse range of collections, but this study does not engage scholars for their input on how they would like to see collections created in the future. 12 Gertz's recent exploration of the prioritization of rare books and special collections for digitization suggests that value and demand must be complemented by high-quality digitization, strong and effective metadata, robust searching capacity, and concern for sustainability. 13 Her assessment considers a varied user audience, but it does not suggest asking the target users what they need from a digital collection.…”

Section: July 2015mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the Scanned Image: A Needs Assessment of Scholarly Users of Digital Collections

Green

Courtney

2015

CRL

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This paper presents an analysis of how humanities scholars use digital collections in their research and the ways in which digital collections could be enhanced for scholarly use. The authors surveyed and interviewed humanities faculty from twelve research universities about their research practices with digital collections and present analysis of the resulting responses. The paper also analyzes a sample of qualitative responses from the Bamboo Technology Project's workshops with faculty, librarians, and technologists about the use and functionalities of digital materials for humanities research. This paper synthesizes these data analyses to propose the critical need for interoperability and data curation in digital collections to increase their scholarly use, and the importance of user engagement in development of digital collections.umanities scholarship integrates the analog with the digital more fully than ever before, as new approaches to humanities scholarship incorporate digital materials, from comprehensive archival projects that require the gathering of materials from around the world to research that uses analytic tools for text mining and social network analysis. This evolution in humanities scholarship emerging from the rise of digital humanities and deeper interdisciplinary orientations for humanities scholars prompt us to ask critical questions about the digital collections that frequently play a significant role in these new scholarly methodologies: specifically, how effectively are digital collections meeting the research needs of scholars, and how should digital collections evolve to sustain and strengthen their value to digital humanities research?This paper presents the results of a study that examines how humanities scholars make use of digital collections and the ways in which digital collections could be enhanced for scholarly research. Through analyses of the survey and interviews of humanities scholars conducted for this study, combined with analyzed responses from focus groups of scholars at the Bamboo Technology Project workshops, this paper argues that libraries, museums, and archives should look beyond discovery

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Impact of digital archival collections on historical research

Cited by 35 publications

References 36 publications

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

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

Semantics for the exploration of historical Business archives: Challenges and perspectives in the R.I.C.E.R.C.A. project

Beyond the Scanned Image: A Needs Assessment of Scholarly Users of Digital Collections

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