Primarily History: Historians' Search for Primary Resource Materials

Primarily History: Historians' Search for Primary
Resource Materials

Helen
Tibbo

UNC-CH
tibbo@ils.unc.edu

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

OVERVIEW.
This paper will present findings from the Primarily History project,
concerning how historians are locating primary sources in the early years of
the digital age. Primarily History, an international study housed at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Glasgow,
also explores how historians teach their students to find such research
materials and how archivists and librarians can facilitate this education
and resource discovery and use. Data provided here reflect
information-seeking behaviors of historians working in the United
States.

NEW PATHWAYS TO PRIMARY RESOURCES.
Historical research has long been a detective game. While ascertaining the
veracity and authenticity of primary resources and the critical
interpretation of documents within the context of historical and cultural
understanding lie at the heart of historical scholarship, the not so trivial
task of locating these materials that serve as the grist of history, must
precede any high level analysis. Throughout the 20th century, historians
sought the materials they needed to shed light on the past in a number of
time-tested ways. Studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s found that
historians most often located relevant primary source materials by following
references in published histories, talking with colleagues, and searching
likely repositories. In a print paradigm these were all appropriate and
efficient methodologies. Recent technologies, however, present the historian
with many new possibilities for locating research materials that may prove
more efficient and even more effective
The road to online finding aids and other digitized resources was not an easy
one for archival repositories. For the past twenty years archivists have
expended a good deal of time, money, intellectual effort, and angst to
produce electronic access tools for the collections in their repositories.
The first efforts focused on creating MARC/AMC (Machine Readable
Cataloging/Archives and Manuscripts Collections) records for online catalogs
and bibliographic utilities such as OCLC and RLIN. Many archivists doubted
the efficacy of MARC, a library-based standard, for archival description. In
the early 1990’s, some pioneering archivists mounted machine-readable text
finding aids on gopher sites on the Internet. By the mid-1990s, a small
group of archivists were developing the Encoded Archival Description SGML
DTD. By the turn of the millennium, most special collection repositories, at
least those in larger units such as academic libraries, had some sort of
website, many of which contained HTML encoded finding aids. Today, a small
but steadily growing number of repositories have EAD finding aids at their
websites. These networked tools not only facilitate information discovery,
they can also prepare a scholar for a very productive in-person visit to a
repository.
Today’s historians can study digitized collections of materials online as
well as search bibliographic databases with descriptions of both secondary
and primary materials. Perhaps most significantly, historians can read,
download, or print entire finding aids for collections in a large number of
archival and manuscript repositories world wide. Now that there is a
significant corpus of finding aids online it is time to explore how
researchers such as historians use them and how archivists might make them
more useful. While spending a good deal to create electronic access, to
date, archivists have conducted few user studies to judge its effectiveness
or ascertain the need for enhanced user education.

PRIMARILY HISTORY PROJECT.
Funded by the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation, The Primarily History
project, 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, is the first international, comparative project to
explore historians’ information-seeking behaviors in today’s web-based,
networked environments. Perhaps most importantly, we are examining how
historians are preparing the next generation of scholars, specifically, what
they are teaching their graduate students about information seeking in the
digital library environment and how the students are learning to use
retrieval tools. This project is also surveying how special collections
libraries and archives provide access to these materials and is seeking
enhanced models for outreach and user education that will facilitate
historians and their students in locating and using primary resources.
Through surveys and interviews we are exploring how historians are employing
these new tools and techniques. Dr. Tibbo from UNC-CH has surveyed 700
historians located at leading U.S. history programs; Dr. Ian Anderson from
Glasgow surveyed close to 800 historians working at universities in the
United Kingdom. Both investigators followed the surveys with in-depth
interviews with a subset of these populations.
Questions in the initial stage of this research focused on scholarly
information-seeking in archives, manuscript repositories, and special
collections libraries. We asked historians how they found the materials upon
which they based their research. Questions included: Do they use library
catalogs or the OCLC or RLIN databases that contain MARC records of finding
aids? Do they use electronic indexes such as Archives USA? Do they search
the Web for finding aids using keywords? Do they go directly to the websites
of likely repositories and search for materials? The interviews asked
historians to describe how they had located primary resource materials for a
recent project and what they taught their graduate students regarding
information seeking methodologies.

A SAMPLING OF FINDINGS.
For many historians working in the United States, the traditional
methodologies for locating primary materials remain the most utilized.
Ninety-eight percent indicated that they found materials by following leads
and citations in printed sources; 77% searched printed bibliographies; 57%
consulted printed documentary editions; 73% searched printed finding aids;
73% searched printed repository guides; 51% used newspaper files to find
other materials; 50% used government documents in this way; and 38% used the
now out-of-date printed NUCMC volumes. The most noticeable difference in
behaviors across ranks is that only 24% of assistant professors used the
printed NUCMC volumes with 40% of all full professors, including
distinguished faculty and deans, using this now out-of-date tool.
Interestingly, however, only 18% of those individuals who had taught history
for 40 years or more searched the printed NUCMC.
Use of traditional resources, however, does not preclude the use of digital
technologies developed within the last decade and populated with research
materials (e.g., a critical mass of electronic finding aids and some
digitized documents) only within the last three to four years. Sixty-nine
percent of the history scholars used their own institution’s online
(library) public access catalog (OPAC) [while digital, and now probably a
web-based technology, not really a new approach]; 64% searched other
institutions’ OPACs via the Internet; 59% used bibliographic utilities such
as RLIN and OCLC; 58% said they looked for information directly on
repository websites; 40% indicated that they searched the Web for primary
materials using a search engine such as Alta Vista or Google. Twelve percent
of respondents indicated they used the Archives USA database, while 14%
searched NUCMC online from the Library of Congress website with only 8
individuals (3% of respondents) exhibiting both behaviors.
At the most superficial level, we can see that historians are using
traditional finding tools more heavily than newer approaches but we need
qualitative interview data to understand why. It may well be that many
individuals are most comfortable employing methodologies they have found
useful throughout their careers and that these tools remain sufficient. It
may also be that they have not found searching the web or bibliographic
utilities very useful. After all, most archival websites have mounted
electronic finding aids only since 1996 with many institutions still working
on making a significant portion of their inventories web accessible. When we
look at the 220 projects with end dates of 1998 or later, 135 or 61% of
these researchers visited repository websites within the course of their
work and 98 (45%) used web search engines to find relevant collections.
Significantly, the historians in this study averaged over twenty years of
teaching experience each. This is significant because the initial round of
interviews indicated that many of the veteran historians had completed the
largest part of their information seeking years ago, having located large
stores of records and papers to analyze for many years. These individuals
appear to invest little time in learning new information-seeking behaviors.
Other individuals who more dramatically shifted topics across projects,
might well seek out primary resources during their entire careers.

PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS.
While much work remains in this study, it is clear that archivists and
special collection curators must both maintain traditional print descriptive
tools and create an increasing number of electronic finding aids and
digitized documents as historians are employing a wide range of information
seeking behaviors. Evidence to date indicates that younger scholars are
turning to digital resources more often than their older counterparts but
such behaviors may also linked be linked to research topic. Additional
interviews, especially with current Ph.D. students will clarify emerging
historical research trends in the early years of the Digital Age. Increasing
use of the Web for information seeking and virtual trips to repositories
demands that archivists create highly accessible websites, study user
behavior so as to improve discovery tools, and provide increased user
instruction for those who will only visit the collection from afar.