users and accessibility

Read:

Gustman, S., Soergel, D., Oard, D., Byrne, W., Picheny, M., Ramabhadran, B., and Greenberg, D. 2002. Supporting access to large digital oral history archives. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Portland, Oregon, USA, July 14 - 18, 2002). JCDL '02. ACM, New York, NY, 18-27

Improving archives-library relations: User-centered ...By: Maher, William J.. Journal of Academic Librarianship, Jan1990, Vol. 15 Issue 6, p355, 9p;

"Primarily History: Historians and the Search for Primary Source Materials, "Helen R. Tibbo

Lee, H. and Smeaton, A.F. (2002). "Designing the User Interface for the Físchlár Digital Video Library." J. Digital Info. 2(4),



I have been looking at articles about researchers find their sources--primary and secondary--and whether the behaviors are specific to institutions. Tibbo's article was especially helpful: she found that (as of 2002) historians were using the Web to find the Web sites of repositories, and then contacting the location directly. She suggests that archivists are relying upon librarians to provide access to archival collections, and that they are failing to do so--I wonder if in fact archivists still believe this is someone else's job? Tibbo also found that researcher want finding aids online, but usually printed them out--but a frequent request is for more materials to be digitized and made available.

The Gustman piece suggests both possibilities and problems with creating digital collection of archival material. The paper details the creation of a digital library containing 116,000 hours of digitized video interviews in 32 languages from 50,000 Holocaust survivors. Oral histories seem to be a good candidate for digitization: the LBJ library has a small number of them online and they are hugely popular. Perhaps because of the narrative format they are less reliant on context than most other records? They help provide context, and also make easy-to-digest primary sources for teachers' use, for example. Once they're online, the oral histories can be linked to other documents--perhaps even to a finding aid?-- for context, and/or to illustrate points made in the interview. As Gustman et.al. point out also, they also provide an excellent opportunity for the development of Web 2.0 tools like user-created collections which can be visible to others. The Físchlár video browser suggests another possibility for Web 2.0 development, a recommender system--perhaps drawn from similar research done by other users of the collection.