User-Driven Technologies: Assessing the Information Needs of History Faculty as a Special User Population

TitleUser-Driven Technologies: Assessing the Information Needs of History Faculty as a Special User Population
Publication TypeThesis
Year of Publication1996
AuthorsAndersen, Deborah Lines
Number of Pages298 pp.
UniversityState University of New York at Albany
Thesis TypePh.D. Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Abstract

The business of providing information services to scholars and students in numerous specialized fields within American universities is becoming increasingly complicated. The number of technology-intensive products is proliferating rapidly and the mode of service delivery has exploded beyond the boundaries of the traditional library and numerous specialized library and research-support facilities associated with major university centers.

This research centers on how empirically based user studies can support the design and acquisition of information-intensive systems within organizations. Specifically, it investigates the electronic information access needs and uses of academic historians on the University Center campuses of the State University of New York at Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, and Stony Brook. Its theoretical foundation draws upon the literature of information science, social science survey and interview research, and diffusion of innovations research. The data were collected through survey research in 1992 and 1996, and through on-site interviews conducted in 1993 and 1996.

The research shows that while these historians have become nearly universal users of personal computers for word processing and electronic mail communications, they are divided in their use of other technologies, including listservs, CD ROMs, and the World Wide Web. Lack of time, instruction, and information were cited as barriers to use of these technologies, while fear of lost productivity through time spent learning and using electronic technologies was also indicated.

Historians did not accept facsimile documents as substitutes for originals. Facsimiles provide the content of a document, but not its context in journals, manuscripts, or archival collections and thus, historians were opposed to the potential division of travel dollars to machine and software purchases. On the other hand, historians were eager to acquire electronic technologies that could provide bibliographic citations, or verify the existence and availability of documents or archival collections.

The report ends with a discussion of the multimethod approach used in this research. It also looks to the future of this approach for studies of information policy, information use over time, diffusion of innovations, and barriers to electronic information use, concluding that this method is a model which has potential for studies of other special user populations.

Annotation

Includes references to historian's use of research libraries and archives.

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