2. Technology and the search for Primary Sources

5.  Archives  Museums  Special Libraries Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

6.  Sources may be difficult to find,  May be located far away, requiring travel,  May be improperly stored, and  Information may not be well organized.

7.  Duff and Johnson (2002) wrote about historians in archives:  4 types of activities emerge:  Orienting themselves to archives, finding aids, sources and collections.  Seeking known material.  Building contextual knowledge  Identifying relevant material.

8.  Meho and Tibbo revisited Ellis’ work in 2003, to see if emerging technology would impact his 6 activities.  They found 4 new activities: accessing, verifying, networking, and information management.  They propose a new model of information seeking behavior, combining these 10 activities into 4 stages: searching, accessing, processing, and ending.

9.  Wendy Shaw in 2001 observed that technology use among English scholars was limited to word processing and email.  Marcia Bates (2001) concluded that new technology wasn’t as prevalent among humanities scholars.  As recently as 2008, Tahir, Mahmood, and Shafique found that arts and humanities teachers still preferred print books and articles over electronic resources.

10.  We still need better classification within collections, but….  Museums, archives, special collections all continue to include more primary source material in electronic format.  Digitized editions of print material are more readily available.  High-resolution images of artifacts are available on museum websites.

11.  Anderson, Ian G. (2004). Are You Being Served? Historians and the Search for Primary Sources. Archivaria, 58, pp. 81-128.  Bates, Marcia J. (2001). Information Needs and Seeking of Scholars and Artists in Relation to Multimedia Materials. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/scholars.html  Duff, W. M & Johnson, C. A. (2002). Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives. The Library Quarterly, Vol. 72:4, pp.472-496.  Meho, Lokman I. & Tibbo, Helen R. (2003). Modeling the Information- Seeking Behavior of Social Scientists: Ellis’s Study Revisited. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 54:6, pp. 570- 587

12.  Shaw, Wendy (2001) The use of the Internet by academics in the discipline of English literature: a quantitative and qualitative approach. Information Research Vol 6:2. http://informationr.net/ir/6-2/ws8.html  Tahir M., Mahmood K., & Shafique F. (2008). Information Needs and Information-Seeking Behaviors of Arts and Humanities Teachers: A Survey of the University of Punjab. Library Philosophy and Practice. Published on the web at: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/tahir-mahmood- shafique.htm  Tibbo, Helen R. (2002). Primarily History: Historians and the Search for Primary Source Materials. International Conference on Digital Libraries, 2002, pp. 1-10.