The literature of the information needs and uses of humanities scholars in universities is reviewed, using, in the main, material published from 1970 onwards. The areas covered include definitions of humanities, the way humanities scholars work and the materials of their research; secondary services; computers and new technology; the role of libraries and library services and comparisons between humanities and other disciplines. The review ends with a brief assessment of the state of the art; an outline of some unanswered questions and some consideration of the future of humanities. The main conclusions drawn are that the literature is piecemeal, at times confusing, and that progress in providing guidelines to librarians on the basis of systematic enquiry is slow.

Humanities scholars: information needs and uses

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the needs of humanists with respect to information and communication technology (ICT) in order to prescribe the design of an e‐humanist's workbench.Design/methodology/approach – A web‐based survey comprising over 60 questions gathered the following data from 169 humanists: profile of the humanist, use of ICT in teaching, e‐texts, text analysis tools, access to and use of primary and secondary sources, and use of collaboration and communication tools.Findings – Humanists conduct varied forms of research and use multiple techniques. They rely on the availability of inexpensive, quality‐controlled e‐texts for their research. The existence of primary sources in digital form influences the type of research conducted. They are unaware of existing tools for conducting text analyses, but expressed a need for better tools. Search engines have replaced the library catalogue as the key access tool for sources. Research continues to be solitary with little collabor...

Understanding the information and communication technology needs of the e‐humanist

This paper is the first part of a two‐part paper, which examines the transition to the electronic information era in academia. Seeks to establish from the published literature to what extent university researchers have accepted, and adapted to, the changes wrought in information activity by seemingly endless technological developments. Within the wider context of the impact of the changing information environment on each of the three clearly discernible components of academic research (the creation of knowledge and standards, the preservation of information, and the communication of knowledge and information to others), disciplinary‐rooted differences in the conduct of research and their influence on information needs are identified, and the resulting inter‐ and intra‐ individual variations in researchers’ information seeking behaviour are explored. Reviewing a large number of studies investigating the integration of electronic media into academic work, an attempt is made to paint the picture of academics’ progressively harnessing the new technologies to scholarly information gathering endeavours, with the expressed hope of affording some insight into the directions and basic trends characterizing the information activity of university faculty in an increasingly electronic environment. *The author is a PhD student at City University and is also Vice‐Director of the Library at the University of Haifa, Israel.

End‐users in academia: meeting the information needs of university researchers in an electronic age

This thesis looks at the information component of the research endeavour at a particularly interesting point in time, when strikingly new developments in both the scholarly world and its information environs cast doubt on the validity of anything and everything we have traditionally been holding true as to academic researchers' information needs and practices. Indeed, the host of societal demands driven transformations in the organisation, values and practices of scholarly knowledge production of recent years, coupled with the technology-enabled, rapidly evolving opportunities for creating, accessing and communicating information suggest that neither researchers' information needs, nor their attempts at meeting these needs could conceivably remain untouched. This state of affairs has been the impetus for undertaking the re-examination reported here of our long-established notions concerning scholarly information needs and practices. The study sets out, therefore, to investigate, analyse and systematically describe the information work of researchers in academe of the knowledge society. This, with the express aim of achieving a comprehensive, state-of-the-art portrayal of the generic, as well as the disciplinary and/or age specific information needs and corresponding information behaviour of today's university-based researchers. Towards this purpose, the thesis integrates three inter-related elements: a user-centred theoretical perspective, proposed by Nicholas (1996,2000), which views an information need as having eleven different dimensions; a state-of-the-art review, based on the literature; and a hybrid, field research project, conducted at the University of Haifa, Israel, comprising two consecutive stages, a two-phase qualitative stage of interviews, and a quantitative stage of a questionnaire survey. Thus, the theoretical perspective and the insights offered by the published literature in the field combine with the data collected for the present undertaking to inform the research questions. Unravelling the complex picture of contemporary academic researchers' information needs has proven to be an undertaking of exceptionally wide scope. Not only does it look at an entire information community, but also, utilising as it does the eleven-pronged analytical framework for assessing information needs, developed by Nicholas (1996,2000) on the basis of his conceptual approach, it also took a far more comprehensive view of the concept of research-related information need than other field-based investigations. Endeavouring to draw an overarching portrayal of the information needs characterising today's academic researchers, the thesis opens, therefore, with the rationale for the investigation, its aims, scope and setting. Then it proceeds to recap our traditionally held notions concerning scholarly work and its information component by reviewing the literature depicting the socio-cultural context of the scientific enterprise. Next the theoretical foundations of the investigation are delineated, followed by a detailed account of the field-work based insights gleaned into the information component of academic research work. Then all of the information presented is interpreted in the light of the research questions, for a comprehensive portrayal of contemporary researchers' information needs and practices to materialise. As surmised, many elements of the present-day, research-associated in formation work, as they emerge from the findings of this investigation, comprise changed or changing features. Nevertheless, the overall picture bears testimony to the continued existence and relevance of those core scholarly information needs, which are dictated by the basic professional values of academics and their discipline-specific research work conventions. Thus, today's researchers may define their information needs in terms of the changing realities of conducting research in academe of the knowledge society, may more or less happily embrace information work practices,w hich involve novel responses to the new challenges posed to them, but their fundamental information needs seem to have remained by and large unaffected by the recent upheavals in the scholarly world and its information environs. Indeed, the present study re-affirms yet again that the inter-disciplinary differences in analytic processes and research work-habits, stemming as they do from the very nature of the way knowledge grows in each of the knowledge domains, entail discretionary information needs and uses both on the inter-individual and the intra-individual level. These needs, summarised here as a generalised profile of scientists, socials scientists, and humanists, whilst clearly indicative of changing elements in contemporary research-associated in formation work, nevertheless bear testimony to the ongoing vital importance of heeding the research-work conventions rooted specific information needs of the different communities comprising the academic population.

The information needs of contemporary academic researchers

Annuity Association or, if they are really venturesome in this last respect, to the College Retirement Equities Fund. I shall betray my formal disciplinary affiliation initially by a brief glance backward for the sake of perspective. As scholarly researchers we live in a world that is drastically different from that of only 25 years ago; the historical analysts of 1953 were surely much more akin in their methods and professional practice to those of 1928 than to our members. I shall not recount the contributions of the institutional agencies that have been involved in this transformation in detail since much of the

Data Dilemmas: Quantitative Data and the Social Science History Association

ions, and are judged as much by esthetic cri eria as by empirical success. How can one index the fundamental principle of the general theory of relativity, that the laws of physics must appear the same to all observers regardless of their relative motion? Although there may be some fields in the sciences (e.g., engineering and chemistry) that lend themselves more readily to applications of the machine than do the humanities, we conclude that existing applications of computers to the scientific literature are highly relevant for the humanities, and every possible effort should be made to transfer the

Simone Reagor

Papers

The Application of Advanced Technology to Scholarly Communication in the Humanities