This article reports on a qualitative research study of the information-seeking behavior of historians. Based on semistructured interviews with ten midcareer historians, it investigates how they locate primary sources, carry out their research, and use archival material. The study identified four different types of information-seeking activities, including (1) orienting oneself to archives, finding aids, sources, or a collection; (2) seeking known material; (3) building contextual knowledge; and (4) identifying relevant material.

Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives

This study investigates Ted Nelson’s works and the influence of his hypertext concept through citation analysis, including citation counting, characteristics of citing articles on language, document type, citing year, discipline, and citation content. The selection of the Nelson’s works was based on searching Library Literature & Information Science, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Google and Yahoo search engines. The citation data were compiled from the database of Web of Science. The results of the study reveal that hypertext has directly great impact on information retrieval and world wide web; therefore, the concept has had profound influence on information, library and computer science disciplines. Moreover, the influence of Nelson’s works spreads to other disciplines variously, especially on education, literature, business and economics, engineering, sociology, psychology, etc. The citation context analysis of citing articles on information and library science reveals that (1) definition, orientation and general introduction of hypertext; (2) relation of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in terms of hypertext; (3) Nelson’s Xanadu system and its component of hypertext; (4) the application of hypertext in information science and library science are four most citing purpose.

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Citation analysis of Ted Nelson’s works and his influence on hypertext concept

The authors report the findings of a study that analyzes and compares the query logs of PsycINFO for psychology and the two history databases of ABC-Clio: Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life to establish the sociological nature of information need, searching, and seeking in history versus psychology. Two problems are addressed: (a) What level of query log analysis—by individual query terms, by co-occurrence of word pairs, or by multiword terms (MWTs)—best serves as data for categorizing the queries to these two subject-bound databases; and (b) how can the differences in the nature of the queries to history versus psychology databases aid in our understanding of user search behavior and the information needs of their respective users. The authors conclude that MWTs provide the most effective snapshot of user searching behavior for query categorization. The MWTs to ABC-Clio indicate specific instances of historical events, people, and regions, whereas the MWTs to PsycINFO indicate concepts roughly equivalent to descriptors used by PsycINFO's own classification scheme. The average length of queries is 3.16 terms for PsycINFO and 3.42 for ABC-Clio, which breaks from findings for other reference and scholarly search engine studies, bringing query length closer in line to findings for general Web search engines like Excite.

User search behavior of domain-specific information retrieval systems: An analysis of the query logs from PsycINFO and ABC-Clio's Historical Abstracts/America: History and Life

This article reports research findings related to converging formats, media, practices, and ideas in the process of academics’ interaction with electronic texts during a research project. The findings are part of the results of a study that explored interactions of scholars in literary and historical studies with electronic texts as primary materials. Electronic texts were perceived by the study participants as fluid entities because the electronic environment promotes seamless interactions with a variety of media and formats. Working with electronic texts combines some traditional information and research practices into new patterns of information behavior. The practice called “netchaining” combines aspects of networking with information‐seeking practices to establish and shape online information chains, which link sources and people. Different forms of exploration of participants’ research questions were enabled by interactions with electronic texts.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/588444

Convergent flows: humanities scholars and their interactions with electronic texts

In a previous study of doctoral history students, I observed that a common practice of these students was to collect names of people from the era and geographical area they were studying, then to place data about these names on 3 × 5-inch index cards. The names and data about the names were used as access points to the material the student was reading, but they also seemed to induce a cognitive effect that was advantageous to the student's task performance. This article investigates the cognitive effect that results from collecting names when the doctoral students recognized patterns among the data elements written down on the 3 × 5-inch index cards. The pattern recognition leads to original thesis formation and expert thinking, which is a requirement of a doctoral dissertation. This article describes this technique of name collecting, illustrates it with a case study from a larger study of doctoral history students, then uses schemata theory and theories on expert cognition to create a theory that explai...

Inducing Expertise in History Doctoral Students via Information Retrieval Design.

PASTEXAMINATIONS OF THE interactions of librarianship with historical scholarship have noted problems that libraries face in serving historians. This article examines changes in the nature of historical work that have occurred over the last four decades including the advent of computers and electronic texts. The authors examine recent developments-such as electronic publishing, electronic mail, electronic journals, and hypertext databases-and suggest that some of these tools will be of limited use to historians, due to the nature of historical scholarship. While some historians may be reluctant to adopt computer technology, many of them already use computers in writing. Historians' personal computers will be a gateway for new forms of electronic information, as evidenced by the publication of various CD-ROM files of relevance to historians. Other publishing projects in the humanities also offer examples that historians can follow in the use of electronic text and images.

Historians, books, computers, and the library

~~~~ ~ Now THAT ARCHIVISTS are becoming more familiar with using the US MARC (United States MAchine Readable Cataloging) formats for describing archival materials, they are in a position to capitalize on those formats’ capabilities for data transfer by integrating machine-readable descriptions of their holdings into wider information systems. While Thomas Hickerson’s article in this issue is concerned with the use by archivists of national and regional bibliographic utilities such as the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), this paper will look at the use of institutional online public access catalogs (OPACs). It will review the utility of call-number searching and will then discuss some possible archival applications. In particular, the Wallace Archives, in the Honnold Library in the Claremont Colleges, is used as an example of where bibliographic descriptions of multiformat archival materials are available online through the library catalog, and where access has been increased to those materials using subject headings, date, and format in conjunction with call- or classification-number searching.

http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/7553/librarytrendsv36i3j_opt.pdf?sequence=1

Matthew Benjamin Gilmore

Papers

Historians, books, computers, and the library

Increasing Access to Archival Records in Library Online Public Access Catalogs