Scholar-built collections: A study of user requirements for research in large-scale digital libraries

Katrina Fenlon, Megan Senseney, Harriett Green, Sayan Bhattacharyya, Craig Willis, J. S. Downie
2014 Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology  
To realize the great potential value of large-scale digital libraries, we need a fuller understanding of the range of ways in which scholarly communities conduct research, or want to conduct research within them. Scholars build collections in the course of their work. How can we anticipate and support various kinds of collection-building and -use, in order to support the diversity of researchers who work in libraries of digital books? This paper reports selected results of a study of how
more » ... al user groups of the HathiTrust Digital Library create and use collections in their research. This study aims to contribute to our broader understanding of scholarly practice, particularly of humanities scholars' collecting activities. The results of the study inform ongoing work to develop a workset-creation tool for the HathiTrust Research Center. Keywords Collections, digital libraries, metadata. The study comprised a series of focus groups and interviews with humanities researchers, computational linguists, computer scientists, technologists, and librarians, in order to elicit their collection-building practices, transformation and preprocessing steps, and desired units and methods of analysis. The questions guiding this research include: R1. What purposes and functions do collections serve for researchers? R2. How do researchers create collections: What sources, tools, and techniques do they use for finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining texts and other resources? What are their inclusion and exclusion criteria? {This is the space reserved for copyright notices.]
doi:10.1002/meet.2014.14505101047 fatcat:ukdwqte6pzcu7fxlvpzjzoox2m