144T h e A m e r i c a n A r c h i v i s t , V o l . 7 1 ( S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 0 8 ) : 1 4 4 -1 6 6 1 An Ontario Premier Research Excellence Award (PREA) and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant funded the research. 2 We define digital archives as "the content and services that archival repositories provide to users via the Internet."Archivists' Views of User-based Evaluation: Benefits, Barriers, and Requirements Wendy M. Duff, Jean Dryden, Carrie Limkilde, Joan Cherry, and Ellie Bogomazova A b s t r a c tThis article reports on the second phase of a study concerned with developing standardized questionnaires for user-based evaluation for archives. Based on a review of current practices used by archivists to gather feedback and focus-group sessions held with archivists, this phase of the study concentrated on archivists' attitudes and concerns about user-based evaluations. It identified archivists' opinions about user-based evaluation of archives including the type of feedback they value, methods they currently employ to gather feedback from users, benefits and problems posed by conducting formal evaluation studies, and ways archivists would use standardized questionnaires for user-based evaluation if these tools were available. The paper also provides some recommendations to help archivists evaluate their services and systems.

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This article reports the findings of a study of the impact of copyright on what U.S. archival repositories select for digitization and the extent to which they seek authorization from rights holders. Based on the website content of 96 repositories, 66 survey responses, and 18 interviews, the findings reveal a wide range of practice. While American repositories are generally conservative in that they digitize holdings that present no copyright complications, there is evidence of a shift from an item-level copyright analysis approach to a bolder risk-assessment approach that may better achieve the archival mission to make holdings available for use. The article identifies tools to support a risk-assessment approach and suggests areas of further research to identify best practices.

Archival repositories have enthusiastically begun to digitize their holdings in order to make them more widely

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