To realize the great potential value of large‐scale digital libraries, we need a fuller understanding of the range of ways in which scholarly communities conduct research, or want to conduct research within them. Scholars build collections in the course of their work. How can we anticipate and support various kinds of collection‐building and ‐use, in order to support the diversity of researchers who work in libraries of digital books? This paper reports selected results of a study of how potential user groups of the HathiTrust Digital Library create and use collections in their research. This study aims to contribute to our broader understanding of scholarly practice, particularly of humanities scholars’ collecting activities. The results of the study inform ongoing work to develop a workset‐creation tool for the HathiTrust Research Center.
This preliminary study explores how library services are offered at the international branch campuses of U.S. institutions of higher education, including librarians’ experiences, challenges faced, and collaborations with the home U.S. institutions. The data from a Web survey distributed to international branch campus librarians, a conducted interview, and statistical data are presented. The small sample survey data are analyzed qualitatively, suggesting insights on how librarians are embedded in student instruction and staff training and how libraries play an important role in the establishment of international branch campuses. A larger study is strongly suggested to gain more concrete inferences, and the article discusses the role of U.S. academic libraries in the globalization initiatives of their home institutions.
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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