Primarily History in America: How U.S. Historians Search for Primary Materials at the Dawn of the Digital Age

Abstract

A b s t r a c tThe Primarily History project is the first international, comparative study to examine historians' information-seeking behaviors since the advent of the World Wide Web, electronic finding aids, digitized collections, and an increasingly pervasive networked scholarly environment. Funded by the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation, Primarily History is a collaboration of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. This article reports on a survey that asked historians teaching American history at sixty-eight top-ranked institutions how they located primary resources for their research. Information-seeking behaviors identified range from traditional print approaches to use of on-line databases, Web searching, and virtual repository visits. Implications are drawn for archives and special collection repositories.M ARC, RLIN, EAD, XML. Archival descriptive practice has undergone an impressive transformation in the past two decades. Where once there was a vision of unique collections best described uniquely, T H E A M E R I C A N A R C H I V I S TT h e A m e r i c a n A r c h i v i s t , V o l . 6 6 ( S p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 0 3 ) : 9 -5 0

References to Archival Materials in Scholarly History Monographs

“…Topically, the books either concern religion (12 books), military (16), STEMM 27 (7), literature (10), or some sort of social science ranging from law to gender studies (47). The remainder of the books did not specify a subject beyond era or region.…”

“…11 Recent citation studies, most notably the work of Donghee Sinn, have focused solely on references to digital sources. 12 In addition, there have of course been influential archival user studies that have used entirely different methodology, including surveys and interviews of historians and other archival information seekers by Margaret Stieg, 13 Duff and Johnson, 14 Duff, Craig, and Cherry, 15 Helen Tibbo, 16 Margaret Stieg Dalton and Laurie Charnigo, 17 and more recently Alexandra Chassanoff.…”

Information behaviour of humanities PhDs on an information literacy course

“…Other studies have referred to the wide variety of source material and the often complex nature of humanities research, for example Toms and O'Brien (2008), Puckett (2010), Rimmer et al (2008), Barrett (2005). An examination of subject-specific studies reveals the diversity of information practices across the humanities, for example music research was examined by Dougan (2012) and Brown (2002), information practices in art history by Larkin (2010) and Beaudoin (2005), and the research of historians by Tibbo (2003) and Rhee (2012). Although Catalano's (2013) review study could not find agreement on consistent information behaviours among humanities researchers, Barrett (2005) has suggested that humanities graduate students do share common approaches to research and 'tend to initiate research projects in haphazard, serendipitous ways ' (p. 330).…”

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].…”