doing historical research in libraries and archives meaning

Libraries, archives and museums (or LAMs) coexist in a variety of organizational settings and face increasing pressure to provide more integrated access to their collections. The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title. not explicitly linked to its professors or its presidents; linkage is only implicit through the contents of the docu-, ments) are the most typical causes for failing to retrieve, relevant material. Springer-V. London Limited, (2009). ... Searching and retrieving documents from large historical archives prove to be challenging for IR field as historians typically employ their knowledge, experience, and intuition to decide which information they will need to find and study and attempt to locate sources that contain the information [4]. The physical order of a collection depends on the size and format of materials and may not match the intellectual order of the collection. Germany Archives collect and preserve original documents from organizations such as churches or governments. From the International Archive of the Women's Movement, and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam). Regarding the way that the mental model for the domain is, built (either taxonomic or semantic net-structured), respon-, dents stated that they try to identify a minimum set of high-, level concepts that are contained in or are relevant to the, historical information they are searching for. (Berg & Lure, 2012, p. 305 ) A Short Survey on Archives and Libraries in Caracas - Volume 17 Issue 2 - Maarten Jan Bakkum Materials do not circulate and must be accessed on site. Elena et al. ital archives do not cover all the needs of historical research. The Italian date corresponds fairly closely, by historical coincidence, to that adopted by the National Archives of the United States, where almost all Archives and special collections contain the most interesting items you'll encounter as you conduct your research, such as valuable and unique objects of historical and cultural significance. Descriptions of each part of a collection are linked together into a "multi-level" archival description, or finding aid, Descriptions of individual items are not linked together unless they form a series of items, Finding aids often contain access points such as subject headings, geographic headings, and authority records (i.e., name(s) of the creator(s) of the archival material), Library catalogue records contain subject headings, Access to certain information may be restricted (e.g., university records, personnel files, research data, etc.). an understanding of past events. recognising the ways in which ideas, thoughts, understandings and opinions are shaped historically, economically, politically and socially through social structures and processes; Determine which rolls of microfilm may be the … Historical Research as a Modern Undertaking Most of those who engaged in historical writing intended for the most part to entertain or to inspire their readers. European Navigator The European Navigator is a multilingual, multisource and multimedia digital library that contains more than 16,000 documents on the historical and institutional development of a united Europe from 1945 to the present day. They contain publications by and about the Commonwealth, as well as historical documents. tion is an relation between an arbitrary number of concepts. Some researchers ﬁnally commented, combinations, because they expected the system to be, “smart enough” to retrieve documents that would match, synonyms, keyword combinations, or terms semantically, of the HA personnel, who indicates which search terms, should be used in which ﬁelds is an additional impedi-, ment, since it introduces delays (HA personnel may not, be always available) and is an additional source of errors, puter usage: approximately 25% of the users that par-, ticipated in the survey have rated their o, skills as “below average”. The organization of the material was designed, material is believed to have had at the time of its crea-, tion, i.e., reﬂect the organization of the University during, rial and extraction of useful information as answers to, queries regarding administrative and research issues of, the University of Athens. Based on an initial, set of these requirements, a prototype tool architecture has, designed. First, a detailed and comprehensive literature analysis, including information competencies of archivists where relevant, as well as those of users, to identify the main issues to be examined. ), and subsequently try to locate the pertinent “Persons” related to the speciﬁc department. those that seem more relevant and then the less relevant ones. To answer pattern-oriented questions it is the accepted solution to transform the underlying (relational) data to what is called the data cube or cross tabulation form (there are other forms as well). University Archives materials are a part of Special Collections. Insofar, the complete ﬁles of the following or. The information in some domains involves entity evolution, a characteristic that introduces additional tasks, such as finding all evolution stages of an entity, and poses additional requirements for the information retrieval process. Вітте для економічного і політичного розвитку Російської імперії. The authors combined two different, approaches to this end, the study of queries made by historians, to an Historical Archive and the use of semi-structured inter-, views with historians. information from their sources. Вітте на розвиток залізничного транспорту у Російській імперії, Amenity as educator: Geographies of education, citizenship, and the CPRE in 1930s England, Gloucester and the Friendly Sea: An Early 20th-Century Art Educator’s Mural as a Pedagogical Hinge, Encoded Archival Description: An Introduction and Overview, How Do We Show You What We've Got? Some studies also show that perceptions of historians towards digital materials is that they are not as reliable as traditional sources [36,37,38], and that digital technologies change patterns of behaviour [39]. al Investigator and leader of the Policy Working Group; Prof. Ross (PI); Dr Vullo (Co-PI) and Dr Anderson (Co-PI). 37–48 (2003), http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=1483, historydetectives/techniques/glossary.html, research in historical archives: historical information visualization, and modeling requirements. W, sion, which may not have been taken into consideration by, An issue worth noting here is that most respondents, declared to prefer to use Place and not Place-Name, even, though they stated that they do not clearly understand the, difference between the two concepts, e.g., the term “Univer-, speciﬁc date is not given to you, it is difﬁcult to search for, something, among several different periods of time, espe-. For me, a very enjoyable way of doing historical research-- you get out there. Archives: Libraries: Materials do not circulate and must be accessed on site. Doing historical research isn't as simple as solving a math problem. Вітте у напрямку розвитку залізничного транспорту у Російській імперії слід вважати наступні: викуп приватних залізниць і концентрацію головної мережі залізниць у руках держави; будівництво нових залізниць на державні кошти; перетворення залізничного господарства на стабільну прибуткову галузь; налагодження і подальший розвиток митної і тарифної систем; початок спорудження Великого Сибірського Шляху. Second, a Delphi study with a small panel of archivists from both countries, to establish consensus or divergence of opinion, and to explore the differences, if any, between amateur and professional historians, and will also investigate any national differences. As interviewers explained, when faced with a particular, topic, they break it down into several questions that deﬁne, their information retrieval tasks from primary and secondary, sources. they would then turn to traditional search methods. Includes instructions on finding archival material at the Dalhousie Libraries. Zarri, G.P. employed by historians for query formulation. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of Mind, DL.org - Coordination Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices, and Modelling Foundations, CHESS - Cultural Heritage Experiences through Sociocultural Storytelling, WhoLoDancE: Whole-body Interaction Learning for Dance Education, Are there various Riegls? A part of the Project "Research Methodology for Non Statisticians" Hypothesis Testing. For instance, instead of requiring the user to explicitly specify the. Besides the implicit reference to, the temporal dimension in these two query topics, approx-, time period or time point to restrict the search scope (in data-, while an additional 4% of the queries targeted to retriev-, ing time points when certain events occurred (e.g., when, the Hippocratic Oath was ﬁrst taken in a graduation cere-, mony of the medical school) or periods (e.g., during which, period did professor Kastorchis serve as a rector). Searching methods for already digitalized data need to be further enhanced and adapted to the needs of certain scientific disciplines. Doing your research How to use Dorset History Centre Dorset History Centre is the archives service and local studies library for Bournemouth, Christchurch, Dorset and Poole holding over 4000 archive collections and Dorset’s local studies library of some 15,000 items. This model assumes, that activation spreads from one conceptual node to those, around it, with greater emphasis to the closer ones. Things like letters, diaries, rare and local publications, pictures, original drawings, and early maps are located in special collections. and `What other animals are present in paintings with dogs (painted during the 19th century and in our collection)?' Outputs included an enhanced, community-driven DL Reference Model and a Technology & Methodology Cookbook with a portfolio of best practices and solutions on common issues for the development of medium and large-scale interoperable DL systems. The lack of metadata or, errors in them could be tackled by broadening the scope, of searches, but this results in retrieving ev, evant documents. Access scientific knowledge from anywhere. In this part of the questionnaire the authors used open, would proceed in locating documents related to a speciﬁc, historic question. Comput. the needed information more rapidly and fully. The researchers. In this process, historians employ their scientiﬁc knowl-, ], typically contents are at least tagged, ] presents the preliminary results of a user, Senate secretariat (transcripts of assemblies and ﬁle of, Protocol (more than 500.000 unbound pages), was crafted. (Berg & Lure, 2012, p. 305 ) Historical research relies on a wide variety of sources, both primary & secondary including unpublished material. Historic research involves finding, using, and correlating information within primary and secondary sources, in order to communicate © 2018 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Libraries and historical archives (HAs) are regarded as the, main repositories for preserving and maintaining histori-, cal documents. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start. You may feel unsure of where to begin, or you may be frustrated by the process. The growth of new informational technologies made these databases available for international scientific studies. Types of Materials: Archives can hold both published and unpublished materials, and those materials can be in any format. b Doing Historical Research in Libraries and Archives Online Public Access from HIST 011 at University of the Fraser Valley Project goal: to mobilise international Digital Library (DL) designers, developers, end-users and researchers from diverse domains in the drive towards interoperability, best practices and modelling foundations for developing and managing DL systems. Finally, we provide general recommendations for searching and analyzing digital databases. Generic concepts, Name and Place are the most extensively used ones, being, employed by 90 and 80% of the users, respectively, were also asked to rank the concepts, starting from the ﬁrst. Third, this article explores the CPRE's authority, revealing the ways in which it was often complex and precarious, as well as the ways in which the Council drew on other forms of authoritative identities, spaces, and structures. metadata ﬁeld against which a keyword must be matched. We need a getaway and entertainment can give us just that. making the implicit explicit; This study presents a user study aiming to record the his-, torians’ information retrieval methods in the context of an, Historical Archive. This can be achieved in various ways, including list-, ing the topics within the keywords (unstructured informa-, tion) or specifying the topics in speciﬁc metadata ﬁelds (more, allows topics to be further classiﬁed into more speciﬁc con-, Commencements, Medal, and award presentations, etc.) For example, for the question: “What is the work of, Kostis Palamas during the years of his tenure as a Secretary, General in the University of Athens”, users provided several, responses as to which sub-topics they would inv, example is “During which period was Kostis P, retary General?”, “Did he visit foreign universities during. Home » Research Tools » How Do I » Manage My Research Output » Best Practices for Storing, Archiving and Preserving Data Best Practices for Storing, Archiving and Preserving Data Research data and related files require reliable and trustworthy storage at all phases of the research … Встановлено масштаби впливу С.Ю. In library and archival science, preservation is a set of activities aimed at prolonging the life of a record, book, or object while making as few changes as possible. Moreover, if certain strat-, egies appeared on the questionnaire, respondents might be, inﬂuenced and include them in their answers, even though, ing “Kostis Palamas as Secretary General of the Univer-, ical evolution of the Chemistry Department of the Uni-, the historical evolution of an organization or city, “Greek Studies” course in the Department of Philosophy, information actually refer to the same entity or synony-, ing “female graduate students of University of Athens, A view shared by almost all interviewed historians was that, digital sources were less reliable than printed, traditional, like archive web pages and general web search in order to, The maintenance of a personal archive of notes and cop-, ies of documents, when possible, either printed or digital, is, a common practice among all researchers. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material including historical artifacts. (Van Dalen, 1972). The ontology schema has been populated by auto-, matically processing the metadata present in the ﬁlenames of, grained and partial, necessitating thus their reﬁnement and, completion. is restricted to Dalhousie students, faculty, and staff. Вітте, яка була спрямована на розвиток залізничного транспорту у Російській імперії загалом, та на посаді міністра шляхів сполучення, зокрема. Drawing on archival research, this paper considers two educational topics, namely, nature study and school design, and makes three key contributions to the geographies of education. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. found that historians exhibit quite sophisticated retrieval competences, concluding that the perceptions of historians that digital resources are less useful and less reliable may be related to the limitations in the functionalities of archival information retrieval systems. Access to the vast majority of online content (e.g., ebooks, journals, etc.) researchers’ queries should be available as metadata. and libraries to assist historical research and, ﬁnally, Sect. Museo, storia dell’arte e conservazione in Alois Riegl. The historical method of research applies to all fields ofstudy because it encompasses there: origins, growth, theories, personalities, crisis, etc. Preliminary findings are presented from a survey of 300 historians studying American History from leading institutions of higher education in the U.S. one of the identiﬁed keywords, for example name—date, or place—name—date. This section describes the major repositories of genealogical and historical records and sources for France. Things like letters, diaries, rare and local publications, pictures, original drawings, and early maps are located in special collections. Examples: The Wisconsin Historical Society, the National Railway Historical Society, the San Fernando Valley Historical Society. Although historical research is greatly based on intuition dur-, ing the information seeking stage, it is not a casual discovery, of facts. Historical research and writing are supported by our Wohl Library, one of the world's greatest open-shelf collections of primary works, reference materials, bibliographical and archival guides. A quick reference page that explains some of the differences between archives and libraries produce in some cases more focused and relevant results, so in this case precision is the main objective of the his-, istry”, apart from the word “Chemistry” they would use, the word “chemical”. can, While the study of the queries provided useful insight as to, which are the topics historians are interested in, it offered no, information whatsoever regarding the methods and strategies. the remaining three were based on queries made to the H.A, but transformed to facilitate recording information for dif-, ferent types of searches. are his/her expectations and preferences. Historical archives of EU institutions NOTE: Each institution and body has its own archives service to manage its documents and files throughout their lifecycle. Four of these tasks were typical queries to, the Historical Archive of the University of Athens, whereas. You meet the people in charge of the collections. and the user may type in any of these areas the desired value, text (as opposed to selecting from a list of values, which is, not supported), while for ﬁelds on the values of which no, restriction is to be placed, the default value of “*” (asterisk), Note that while the researcher may directly search the dig-, ital archive without the intervention of the archi, correctly formulating queries that will return the desired doc-, uments, since the metadata attributes effectiv. These documents include government and church records. Historical research is almost always done based on the accounts of people who have their own biases and motivations. concepts in more generic and more speciﬁc ones. The two approaches have been implemented as the prototype systems Homer and MOTC. Проведені дослідження дозволили систематизувати та критично оцінити джерела, присвячені впливу діяльності С.Ю. This suggests that the vocabulary to be used in any tools, and aids that will be made available to historians should be, carefully chosen, so as to be clear to the tools’ users, since. The focus of this, study is more general and attempts to record and investigate, study concerning the way historians locate primary resource, materials in the digital age. ), which are regarded to be useful, are provided with an interface that allows them to spec-, ify the characteristics of the documents they want to, retrieve and matching documents can be then viewed, on-screen (if their content has been digitized) or fetched, by the archive personnel. Permanent growth of scientific information and the traditional dispersed form of its storing (books and journals) negatively affect its current use in the historical studies, for example, for estimating the role of certain scientists in the history of science. Nevertheless, the vast majority of queries, were restricted by periods or time points speciﬁed using year-, level granularity (“Information for the Chair of Physiology, of the Medical School from 1931 to 1939”). In this, process, historians employ their scientiﬁc knowledge, expe-, rience, and intuition to formulate queries (who was involv, try to locate the pertinent information from their sources. Learn more. Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece, based on the analysis of primary sources [, Historians conducting research systematically examine, interpretation to recapture the nuances, personalities, and, ideas that inﬂuenced these events, and the expected research, outcome is to communicate an understanding of past events, edge, experience and intuition to decide which information, they will need to ﬁnd and study during each next step, and, subsequently attempt to locate sources that contain this infor-, mation. Tentative conclusions indicate the need to provide multiple pathways of access to historical research materials including paper-based approaches and newer digital ones. with the relation being drawn from the taxonomy of events. to identify more and more related concepts. In addition, 35% of the users, stated that they not feel conﬁdent enough to use advanced, search, although the latter can limit the number of results, searching for documents in the “Educational” thematic, category, entering “Educational” in the simple search, nizational unit” and the “Thematic category” metada-, ta slots, whilst if advanced search were employed, the, user would clearly designate his/her intention by enter-, ing the search term in the appropriate area in the search, The above ﬁndings are inline with the observations in [, where it is concluded that “the overwhelming majority of his-, torians want to see and use historical sources in their original, format” and that “electronic access and digital reproductions, information retrieval and semantic web technologies in the, past years should be put to the service of historical archive, researchers, by incorporating techniques and practices into, digital ﬁnding aids. practice, such as: A term that has been known for a long time, but requires a meaning of abstraction in order to be developed to form a new understanding of a domain, and thereby make it easier to build an approach to the issues that are present with it. ticularly important in the context of historical archives, since names are often found to be written with different, of institution appears to be a frequent query, the tools, should assist researchers in locating documents that refer, to different periods of the same entity. © 2008-2021 ResearchGate GmbH. While much work has examined inter-war preservationism and the CPRE's focus on planning legislation and design, less attention has been paid to the CPRE's cultures of education for children and young people. Extending the presented surveys to, include subjects working in other archives and/or different, historical subjects (e.g., national history) will also be consid-, The authors also plan to continue elaborating on the, requirements for creating digital tools for specialized and, demanding user groups like history researchers, exploiting, the extensive user studies undertaken within the EU funded, intends to provide the appropriate ontology-based technol-. According to the above, searches are very difﬁcult without the, on its tacit knowledge and experience, rather than on some, and tools that would offer guidance and automation for search, tasks. The interviewed historians, were researchers with knowledge and experience in informa-, were chosen to be familiar with digital technologies related, to information retrieval, in order to provide a more complete, view on how they search for information both on digital and, printed sources. A search was conducted of historical newspaper databases and a small number of books and journal articles for information on the different firearms used in policing since their inception. Insofar, a number of museums, such as the Brook-, contents, helping other users to ﬁnd them or even, forming research in an archive can contribute such, information to the system through appropriate inter-, scheme, the entities of interest in the domain of dis-, course and the timeline covered by the repository should, be expressly represented using an appropriate scheme, (taxonomy or semantic network), and be made available, to researchers, alleviating thus the need to rely on the, ful search. Instead, it requires just the right approach, or else you are likely to find a wrong answer. “History is about the preservation, recording, systematic analysis, correlation, and the interpretation of events of the past.” (Godfrey, 2011, p.5) The Palmer House held events of entertainment that tell us our story of how pillars of entertainment were put in place and set in motion for us to enjoy the present day. The historical document can be defined as those that keep information related with time instant at which the documents were published while is still useful in the future [4]. We demonstrate how various combinations of search criteria meet certain needs of science historians. International Journal on Digital Libraries, Malta College of Arts, Science & Technology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Information Competencies of Historians as Archive Users: A Slovenia/UK Comparison, Using Ontology-Based Approach to Improved Information Retrieval Semantically for Historical Domain, Building an Event Ontology for Historical Domain to Support Semantic Document Retrieval, A Media Moment Shot of Entertainment in the Chicago Nights of October 1953, Selection Methods of Digital Information Resources for Scientific Heritage Studies: A Case Study of Georgy F. Gause, Effectiveness of Visualization for Information Retrieval through Ontologies with Entity Evolution: The Impact of Ontology Modeling, A historical examination of police firearms, Історичний аналіз впливу діяльності С.Ю. Most research involves looking at what's happening right now. The story I tell is of a woman who had a deep connection to the local and whose experience in the mural course served as a pivot point (Ellsworth, 2005) in her own becoming—one which brought her lifelong experiences of place into relation, allowing her to see the known anew. In 10, 20 or even 30 years from now we could see libraries with completely paperless reading areas, touchscreen information portals and robotic assistants as guides. go to Enquiries and research services. Since the, organization of the archive is based either on years or the-, matic categories and contains no indication regarding the rec-, tors’ names, the HA personnel should use its tacit knowledge, regarding the history of the university to conclude that Mis-, sail Apostolides served as a rector during the academic years, 1842–1843 and 1850–1851 (this piece of information could, be also contributed by the researcher); therefore, the set of, documents pertaining to these academic years can be exam-, ined to locate the ones that the user had requested for. In this process, historians employ their scientific knowledge, experience, and intuition We suggest selection methods suitable for historical studies and determine their effectiveness on the example of the influence of a Russian biologist Georgy F. Gause (1910-1986) and his evolutionary concepts.