Use, Appraisal, and Research: A Case Study of Social History

Miller, Fredric

doi:10.17723/aarc.49.4.e1251j7r1125525n

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…In his study, Miller (1986) proposed four levels of intensity: incidental use, substantive use, important use, and fundamental use. Miller based his analysis on seven data elements pertaining to characteristics of the resource consulted and the nature of the citation.…”

Section: Taking Flightmentioning

confidence: 99%

“What’s So Special about Special Collections?” Or, Assessing the Value Special Collections Bring to Academic Libraries

Dupont¹,

Yakel²

2013

EBLIP

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2013 DuPont and Yakel. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License 2.5 Canada (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one. AbstractObjective -The objective of this study was to examine and call attention to the current deficiency in standardized performance measures and usage metrics suited to assessing the value and impact of special collections and archives and their contributions to the mission of academic research libraries and to suggest possible approaches to overcoming the deficiency.Methods -The authors reviewed attempts over the past dozen years by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to highlight the unique types of value that special collections and archival resources contribute to academic research libraries. They also examined the results of a large survey of special collections and archives conducted by OCLC Research in 2010. In addition, they investigated efforts by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) dating back to the 1940s to define standardized metrics for gathering and comparing data about archival operations. Finding that the library and archival communities have thus far failed to develop and adopt common metrics and methods for gathering data about the Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2013, 8.2 10 activities of special collections and archives, the authors explored the potential benefits of borrowing concepts for developing user-centered value propositions and metrics from the business community.Results -This study found that there has been a lack of consensus and precision concerning the definition of "special collections" and the value propositions they offer, and that most attempts have been limited in their usefulness because they were collections-centric. The study likewise reaffirmed a lack of consensus regarding how to define and measure basic operations performed by special collections and archives, such as circulating materials to users in supervised reading rooms. The review of concepts and metrics for assessing value in the business community, however, suggested new approaches to defining metrics that may be more successful.Conclusion -The authors recommend shifting from collection-centric to user-centric approaches and identifying appropriately precise metrics that can be consistently and widely applied to facilitate cross-institutional comparisons. Adopting a user-centric perspective, they argue, will provide a broader picture of how scholars interact with special collections at different points in the research process, both inside and outside of supervised reading rooms, as well as how undergraduate students change their thinking a...

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Section: Taking Flightmentioning

confidence: 99%

“What’s So Special about Special Collections?” Or, Assessing the Value Special Collections Bring to Academic Libraries

Dupont¹,

Yakel²

2013

EBLIP

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“…Miller (1986) confirms that historians do not use archives as expected and their research is not intellectually archives-driven. "While social historians may sometimes ask archivists to save everything, in reality they have concentrated on reinterpreting existing holdings.…”

Section: User Studies In Archivesmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Thanks to these studies, the archival community has accumulated a great deal of important information about users. These studies address the necessity to move attention from materials to clients (Speakman 1984;Freeman 1984;Dearstyne 1987;Orbach 1991); patterns of archival users' information-seeking processes (Stevens 1977;Stieg 1981;Conway 1986b;Miller 1986;Tibbo 2003;Johnson 2002, 2003;Duff et al 2004); the importance of use and user studies (Maher 1986;Conway 1986a;Ruth 1988); researchers' citation patterns of archival materials (Elliot 1981;Beattie 1989Beattie /1990); experienced users' archival knowledge (Yakel and Torres 2003); and usability and relevancy of digital collections and finding aids in the Web environment (Tibbo 2003;Yakel 2004). These studies provide valuable understandings about archival users and form the basis of traditional user studies.…”

Section: User Studies In Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This study adapts the research design of seeking to learn about users' research patterns with documentary evidence and their perception of using archives. This study was inspired by the research design of some archives and library users' studies that encourage archivists and librarians to better understand users from their work patterns, interpretation processes, hypotheses-building methods, and final results of their research products (Case 1991;Weintraub 1980;Miller 1986). Understanding the communication of No Gun Ri researchers and archival materials will help to comprehend how and why archival materials played a role in building knowledge of the No Gun Ri massacre.…”

Section: User Studies In Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Room for archives? Use of archival materials in No Gun Ri research

Sinn

2010

Arch Sci

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Archivists have long tried to understand users from the viewpoint of their archival collections. Such an approach misses important perspectives about use in, and users of, archives; how they perform research and develop knowledge while using archives. This study aims to comprehend the use of archival materials in research from the users' perspective. It attempts to understand users' perceptions of the impact of archival collections on their research, how and when archival materials are involved in the research process and how much weight they grant those materials in support of their thesis, from an actual research topic, the No Gun Ri massacre. The case of the No Gun Ri incident provides a good example of how archival materials play a role in historical discussions and an opportunity to look at archival contributions. No Gun Ri researchers acknowledged that archival documents were essential source materials for details about the incident and a major player in stimulating controversies and, consequently, provided the impetus for further publications. General recordkeeping situations also provided a circumstantial context of the incident. However, No Gun Ri researchers agreed that oral history was the most valuable and influential evidence for their major ideas and used archival documents to provide hard facts about the details of oral history. There are some unique research patterns of No Gun Ri researchers identified in this study which are different from the typical assumptions of archivists.

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“…5 But most relevant to this study is the work of Frederic Miller, who looked at archival use in 214 journals, tabulating how many repositories, collections, and series were used. 6 While similar, my study differs from Miller's in two significant ways: Miller's is a true citation study, interested in looking at "significance of use" of a collection or series as reflected in how many citations there are to a particular collection. 7 Second, I do not look at individual series or collections, as Miller does in his work; instead, I merely count each time any collection is used from the same repository in the same book.…”

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confidence: 99%

References to Archival Materials in Scholarly History Monographs

Bronstad

2018

RBM

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Citation analysis, or the counting of the number of times specific resources are cited in scholarly publications, is a common tool in library and information sciences and has been in practice for around a century. This form of analysis is popular because it provides metric-based feedback about use of documents. But it has rarely been used to investigate use of archival material.I have attempted to adapt citation analysis to the examination of archival collection and repository use. In my study, I have set out to look at citations of archival material in a sample of 136 recently published, single-authored books (or monographs) produced by highly cited university presses in the United States and made available as e-books and categorized according to subject by Project Muse. The intended goal is to examine the feasibility of using citation analysis to discover patterns in scholarly user reportage of archival use. Factors studied include the percentage of monographs that cite archival material; variations in number of formats (physical or digital) and repositories referenced; and whether specific historical subjects are more likely to follow distinct usage patterns.It should be noted that unlike a strictly defined "citation study," which counts each time a source is cited, this is a "reference study," which counts each archival collection only once per book, even if it is cited multiple times.

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Use, Appraisal, and Research: A Case Study of Social History

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

“What’s So Special about Special Collections?” Or, Assessing the Value Special Collections Bring to Academic Libraries

“What’s So Special about Special Collections?” Or, Assessing the Value Special Collections Bring to Academic Libraries

Room for archives? Use of archival materials in No Gun Ri research

References to Archival Materials in Scholarly History Monographs

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