I’ve just read two recent papers and am thinking that that they might be useful to us. My immediate thoughts after reading them are (1) whether should we develop a plan to collect undergraduate honor theses? (2) where is the long-for mega-search engine for library resources — EBSCO Discovery, OCLC WorldShare, or something else? and (3) how can we embed subject expertise in the curation process of digital collections and in a more effective way?
SM Stone, MS Lowe – College & Undergraduate Libraries, 2014
Undergraduate theses are available through open access institutional repositories. Is undergraduate work being integrated into the larger body of academic research, and, if so, how? Institutional repositories containing undergraduate theses were selected and titles were searched using the forward citation feature in Google Scholar to determine if and where undergraduate scholarship is being cited. Results show that 24 percent of citations to senior theses were in peer-reviewed or refereed journals and 33 percent in dissertations and theses. This article addresses citation source and the potential value of undergraduate scholarship as well as the implications for information literacy instruction to senior thesis students.
2. Beyond the Scanned Image: A Needs Assessment of Scholarly Users of Digital Collections
HE Green, A Courtney – College & Research Libraries, 2014
This paper presents an analysis of how humanities scholars utilize digital collections in their research and the ways in which digital collections could be enhanced for scholarly use. The authors surveyed and interviewed humanities faculty from twelve research universities about their research practices with digital collections and present analysis of the resulting responses. The paper also analyzes a sample of qualitative responses from the Bamboo Technology Project’s workshops with faculty, librarians, and technologists about the use and functionalities of digital materials for humanities research. This paper synthesizes these data analyses to propose the critical need for interoperability and data curation in digital collections to increase their scholarly use, and the importance of user engagement in development of digital collections
According to the research, humanities researchers’ top needs are —
- Better search functionality
- Need for annotation and editing tools
- Improvement in user interface design
- Expanded completeness of the collection’s content.
Leave a Reply