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Accessing and Using Digital Libraries in Art History

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Digital Research and Education in Architectural Heritage (UHDL 2017, DECH 2017)

Abstract

Over the past decades, the increase in the use of digital resources and the growth of research conducted in digital environments has transformed academic scholarship. The goal of this paper is to highlight the importance of understanding user behavior and needs for building digital libraries and resources that have a positive effect on the whole scholarly workflow. For this purpose, the art historical discipline will be used as a case study; by employing an ethnographic approach to the study of scholarly habits, we managed to uncover the requirements that scholars in the field have in terms of accessing and using digital libraries. The complex information behavior of art historians as well as the challenges they often face when interacting with digital resources make them a great example to demonstrate the impact that digital libraries and archives can have on the research process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The stages included in the ISP model are: initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, presentation. Each stage has associated feelings, thoughts, actions and tasks and can be found in Kuhlthau [21, p. 367].

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Correspondence to Christina Kamposiori .

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Kamposiori, C., Warwick, C., Mahony, S. (2018). Accessing and Using Digital Libraries in Art History. In: Münster, S., Friedrichs, K., Niebling, F., Seidel-Grzesińska, A. (eds) Digital Research and Education in Architectural Heritage. UHDL DECH 2017 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 817. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76992-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76992-9_6

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