dalton.indd


           
  

             
  

 
 

    
           

   
   

    

      
     

        
 

      

      

   

    

      

     

      
    

 
      
     

    

Historians and Their Information 
Sources 

Margaret Stieg Dalton and Laurie Charnigo 

This article reports on a survey of historians and a citation analysis un-
dertaken to revisit the questions treated in Margaret F. Stieg’s 1981 article 
published in College & Research Libraries. It examines which materials 
historians consider to be the most important and how they discover them. 
Their attitudes toward and use of electronic materials were also studied. 
Many characteristics of historians’ information needs and use have not 
changed in a generation: informal means of discovery like book reviews 
and browsing remain important, as does the need for comprehensive 
searches. Print continues to be the principal format. What has changed 
is that the advent of electronic resources has increased historians’ use of 
catalogs and indexes in their efforts to identify appropriate primary and 
secondary sources of information. 

n 1750, Lord Chesterfield 
dismissed history as “only 
a confused heap of facts,” 
unless there were maps and 

chronologies at hand to organize it; in 
1980, the historian John Cannon assigned 
the sense-making role to the historian. To 
Cannon, the historian was “essentially a 
bringer of order to the past, a perceiver of 
pa erns.” What had taken place between 
those two statements was the evolution 
of a new cra —that of the professional 
historian.1 

The business of the historian is to “re-
search, analyze, and interpret the past,” 
or as one historian has described it, “It’s 
the collecting of data, it’s the collating 
of data, it’s thinking about it, piecing it 
together, trying to extract meaning from 
it and trying to establish pa erns out of 

thousands of li le scraps of information.”2 
In the course of their research, historians 
use sources of information that include 
“government and institutional records, 
newspapers and other periodicals, pho-
tographs, interviews, films, and unpub-
lished manuscripts such as personal 
diaries and le ers.” These materials are 
the raw materials of research, the primary 
sources. To enrich analysis and interpre-
tation, they seek secondary sources that 
are the writings of other historians and 
of scholars in other disciplines, especially 
in the social sciences, that offer theories 
and insights to illuminate the object of 
study. Evidence plus interpretation are 
the substance of historical study.3 

It is no coincidence that historians have 
been prominent in the development of 
research libraries; Justin Winsor, librarian 

Margaret Stieg Dalton is a Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University 
of Alabama; e-mail: mdalton@slis.ua.edu. Laurie Charnigo is an Education Librarian in the Houston Cole 
Library at Jacksonville State University; e-mail: charnigo@jsucc.jsu.edu. 

400 

mailto:charnigo@jsucc.jsu.edu
mailto:mdalton@slis.ua.edu


    
  

     

    
    

    

     
   

 

    

     

      
 

      

        
    

     
 

     
     

       

      
    
     

      
     
      

        
      
      

       
     

         
       
        

       
     

      
 

   

     

        

 

      
     
       

     

     
     

Historians and Their Information Sources 401 

of Harvard from 1877 to 1897, is only the 
best known. As their interests expanded 
beyond political history to encompass 
economic, social, and cultural interests, 
from concentration on leaders to include 
ordinary citizens of every race, color, 
creed, and gender, and from the United 
States and Western Europe to the entire 
globe, historians pressed consistently for 
ever more comprehensive research col-
lections. The redefinition of acceptable 
sources to legitimize those that present 
popular culture expanded their informa-
tion needs still further. Diffuse (some 
exasperated collection development of-
ficers would add insatiable) is the only 
adequate description of the information 
needs of historians.4 

This study, a sequel to the study pub-
lished in 1981 by Margaret F. Stieg on the 
information needs of historians, examines 
the information sources used by histori-
ans to identify material for both research 
and teaching.5 It addresses the sources 
historians consider important, how they 
locate them, and what their preferences 
and priorities are. Particular a ention is 
paid to the role of electronic resources. 
A transformation in how information is 
delivered to scholars has taken place in 
the past twenty years, and the information 
available has changed in both character 
and quantity. How have the practices of 
historians changed? 

At the beginning of March 2003, a six-
page survey, accompanied by a personal 
le er, was sent to a random sample of 986 
historians chosen from history depart-
ments of universities in the United States 
classified by the Carnegie Classification 
of Institutions of Higher Education as 
doctoral/research universities—extensive 
(see Appendix A). The survey also was 
available online. Three weeks a er the 
initial mailing, an e-mail that included 
the link to the online survey was sent in 
the hope of increasing response. A total of 

278 (27%) usable surveys were returned, 
of which 184 (66%) were by mail and 94 
(33%) were online. In October 2003, a 
follow-up survey of seven open-ended 
questions was sent to sixty-six respon-
dents to the March survey who had ex-
pressed their willingness to be contacted 
if the authors had further questions (see 
Appendix B). Exactly half of the sixty-six 
responded; many thoughtful, insightful 
answers were obtained. 

“Information sources” is a term that 
means different things to different 
people. Librarians usually use it to sig-
nify the bridges that get scholars to the 
sources of the primary and secondary 
material they need for research, whether 
those bridges are in print, electronic, or 
human form. Historians sometimes use 
the term in the same sense but also may 
use it to mean the primary and second-
ary material that is the raw material of 
their research. The format of the survey 
was designed to accommodate both in-
terpretations, and the results reflect this 
definitional variation. 

To obtain complementary information, 
citations in books and articles were ana-
lyzed. Because what people do o en fails 
to match what they say—a behavior pat-
tern to which historians were considered 
unlikely to be an exception—perception 
and reality can be two different things. 
If, for example, historians assert that 
audiovisual materials are very important 
to their work but never cite them, the con-
trast has to raise doubts about the value 
of the assertion. Two separate sets of data 
were created, one based on fi y citations 
randomly selected from each of five books 
and five journals clustered around the 
year 2001 and the other selected from five 
books and five journals clustered around 
1975. The books selected for analysis 
were chosen from among those awarded 
prizes by the American Historical As-
sociation on the assumption that these 



     
    

     
     

 

        

     
      

     
     

      
     

      
       

     
     

     

      
     

     
     

      

    

     
    
     
      

     

    
    

    

  
       

    

 
      

      

     
    

       
     

    

     

     

       

    
       
      

 402 College & Research Libraries 

books represented the profession’s idea 
of excellence. The five journals were 
those journals of historical scholarship 
that had the highest impact factor in the 
ISI rankings. Each data set included the 
author, brief title, date of publication, 
language, type of publication, and LC 
number of every bibliographic reference 
in the citations.6 

The Literature of Information Seeking 
At the time of the Stieg study on the 
information needs of historians, studies 
of information behavior were relatively 
infrequent. They have since become so 
common that they are now a “flood.” 
Donald Case estimates the number of 
publications on the subject of informa-
tion behavior at more than ten thousand 
in the 1990s alone. This literature can be 
categorized into studies that look at the 
use of channels and sources of informa-
tion, studies of the seeking of information 
and the encounter with information by 
the individual, and studies of the inter-
pretation and meaning that individuals 
derive from information. It can be divided 
on the basis of the population studied, the 
research method employed, and the type 
of information sought. In addition, the 
corpus includes efforts to develop models, 
theories, and paradigms of information 
behavior.7 

Studies that take historians as their 
population and that emphasize how and 
why they seek the information they do 
include those of Peter Hernon, Donald 
O. Case (1991), Charles Cole, Roberto 
Delgadillo and Beverly P. Lynch, Rebecca 
Green, and Wendy M. Duff and Catherine 
A. Johnson. Case’s study described how 
twenty American historians chose their 
research topics and how they progressed 
as they sought information in libraries 
and archives, recorded and organized 
their findings, and wrote about their sub-
jects. Cole studied the cognitive activity of 

September 2004 

forty-five Ph.D. history students in rela-
tion to information events. Delgadillo and 
Lynch also studied history graduate stu-
dents, paying particular a ention to the 
similarities and differences between their 
information-seeking behavior and that of 
established scholars. Duff and Johnson’s 
focus was on the search for information 
within archives and Hernon’s on the use 
of government publications by histori-
ans. Green’s article a empted to test the 
effectiveness of following up citations in 
footnotes by generating twelve questions 
in the humanities, four of which had some 
historical element, and then comparing 
a empts to identify seed documents by 
searching bibliographic sources and us-
ing footnotes.8 

Pertinent studies that emphasize what 
historians do rather than the how and 
why can be divided into those that, like 
Stieg’s 1981 study, look at information use 
by individual scholars broadly and those 
that focus on a particular aspect or type 
of information use. In only a few cases is 
the population in these “what” studies 
limited to historians; more frequently, 
historians are one of the groups of schol-
ars in studies that look at the informa-
tion pa erns of social scientists and/or 
humanists.9 Such studies include the 
pioneering work done at Bath University 
under the leadership of Maurice Line on 
the information needs of social scientists, 
work that included some areas of history, 
and the Sheffield studies of the informa-
tion needs of humanists, which included 
historians. Susan S. Guest studied the 
use of bibliographic tools by humanities 
faculty members at SUNY Albany and 
Rebecca Watson-Boone summarized the 
picture of the humanist as of the mid-
1990s. Constance C. Gould’s assessment, 
based on interviews with scholars in the 
humanities, is a straightforward summary 
of the types of sources need by historians. 
A recent study by the Digital Library 



      
     

    
    

    
 

       

      
      

     
       
         

        
     
     
    

       
       

       
      

      
      

        
      

       
       

     
     

        
      

         
  

     

    

     

      

       
   

   

    
    

  

      

      
     

 

 
 

     
       

       
       
      

        
       

       
       
       

      
     

    
        
        

      
       

      
   

      

Historians and Their Information Sources 403 

Federation, the Council on Library and 
Information Resources, and Outsell, Inc., 
gives a detailed statistical picture of the 
use of libraries and information sources 
by faculty and graduate students in all 
fields. Only broad categories such as 
social sciences and biological sciences, 
however, are analyzed, not individual 
disciplines. Many questions in this DLF/ 
CLIR/Outsell study relate to electronic 
formats.10 By limiting its scope to histori-
ans, the current study will be able to give 
a more detailed picture of the informa-
tion behavior pa erns that prevail in the 
practice of historical scholarship and fill 
in some of the outlines that have emerged 
from broader studies. 

Research also has been conducted to 
distinguish among the different stages of 
information-seeking behavior, a focus that 
o en incorporates not only the how and 
why, but also the what. In an early study 
of this kind, Peter A. Uva identified five 
stages of historians’ research: problem se-
lection, detailed planning, data collection, 
analysis and interpretation, and writing/ 
rewriting, and, in general terms, the types 
of information used at each stage. Uva 
pointed out that historians tend to work 
at the different stages simultaneously; one 
historian quoted by Barbara C. Orbach 
considered that “all stages are potentially 
present all the time to some degree.” Case’s 
1991 study of American historians was in-
fluenced by Uva’s work. Other articles that 
look at the stages of information include 
David Ellis’s model of the information-
seeking pa erns of academic researchers 
and Clara M. Chu’s study of literary critics. 
Another article of interest is the modifica-
tion of Ellis’s model by Helen R. Tibbo and 
Lokman I. Meho.11 

A work of particular relevance to 
the present study is Tibbo’s Abstracting, 
Information Retrieval and the Humanities. 
Her goal was to identify ways in which 
indexing and abstracting in history could 

be improved, and in pursuit of this pur-
pose, she addressed many of the same 
topics that this study does. She discussed 
the nature of history and examined the in-
formation-seeking behavior of historians. 
Her conclusions were based on in-depth 
interviews conducted with twenty-five 
historians at the University of Maryland, 
College Park, in the fall 1988 semester.12 

Citation studies, beginning with the 
dissertation done by Arthur Monroe 
McAnally at the University of Chicago in 
1951 on the materials used in the study of 
U.S. history, look at information sources 
used by historians in a different way. 
The 1972 article by Clyve Jones, Michael 
Chapman, and Pamela Carr Woods was 
based on an analysis of seven thousand 
references drawn from a sample of articles 
on English history. Studies of citations 
in individual journals are common: the 
American Historical Review, the Journal of 
American History, the Tennessee Historical 
Quarterly, Technology and Culture, and the 
Journal of Garden History are among those 
that have been analyzed.13 

In any study of information-seeking 
behavior done in the past fi een years, 
digital information has been at least an el-
ement, and many studies center on some 
aspect of technology. Older work (more 
than ten years old) is mainly of historical 
interest at this point, showing how far 
and how fast scholars in the humanities 
have come. Recent writing has tended to 
focus on the Web. Two groups of stud-
ies are of particular interest. Stephen 
Wiberley and William Goodrich Jones 
looked at the information-seeking pat-
terns of humanists in 1989, in 1994, and 
again in 2000 to give an excellent picture 
of evolving behavior. The Ge y project 
studied the use of DIALOG databases in 
1988–1990 by scholars in the humanities 
in great detail.14 

Most recently, articles that look at elec-
tronic publishing have begun to appear. 

http:detail.14
http:analyzed.13
http:semester.12
http:formats.10


      

   
    

     
     

    

    

     

    

     
     

     
     

     

    

      

      

     
      

      
      

    

      
    

      
     

    

      

   

      

      

      

   
     

      

   
      

 

    
     

     

    

      

 404 College & Research Libraries 

A 1999 survey of Canadian faculty in 
the social sciences and humanities gives 
detailed information on their use of and 
a itudes toward electronic publishing. 
Suzanne Graham analyzed citations in 
the American Historical Review and the 
Journal of American History with particular 
a ention to electronic sources. Articles 
on electronic information sources, most 
of which are primarily informative and 
descriptive rather than analytical, have 
begun to appear in mainstream histori-
cal journals. Their presence indicates a 
new stage of information awareness and 
concern among historians.15 

The considerable body of research has 
established the features of humanistic 
research. Sue Stone’s 1982 description is 
the standard: 
• Humanists tend to work alone. 
• Humanists need to browse. 
• Humanists use a variety of ap-

proaches to their materials, o en borrow-
ing methods associated with disciplines 
other than their own. 

• Humanists need a wide range of 
primary materials, but books and journals 
are the most frequently used formats. 

To this picture of humanistic research, 
Ron Blazek and Elizabeth Aversa add 
the importance of questions of value and 
the centrality of the library. Subsequent 
research has amplified these features, 
such as Wiberley’s point that respect for 
influential peers also was characteristics 
of humanists, but the basic model remains 
intact. This model is an accurate descrip-
tion of historians’ practices and a founda-
tion on which to build.16 

The Historians 
The 278 historians who completed the 
survey tended to be senior faculty and 
older faculty; over half were full pro-
fessors and 41 percent had more than 
twenty-six years of teaching experience 
at the postsecondary level. Two-thirds 

September 2004 

were male, one-third female. The way the 
respondents chose to describe themselves 
tells much about the character of historical 
scholarship. The vast majority (86%) used 
a geographical term. American historians 
were the single largest group (38%), fol-
lowed by European (29%), Latin Ameri-
can/French West Indies (7%), and Asian 
(7%). Only 56 percent of the historians 
described themselves with a chronologi-
cal limitation, but 82 percent selected a 
topical category. Chronologically, their 
interests are predominantly in the mod-
ern or early modern period. Topically, the 
most common labels chosen were social 
history (19 historians), women’s history 
(13), and cultural history (10). Nine in-
dividuals each chose religious, scientific, 
and legal history; and six individuals each 
chose political, medical, intellectual, and 
foreign policy/foreign relations. These 
pa erns confirm the prominence of newer 
areas, such as social and cultural history, 
as well as the increasing fractionation of 
the field because many historians felt that 
more than one category was necessary to 
describe themselves. Twenty-five years 
ago, history was an umbrella term; the 
passage of time has only made it a more 
capacious umbrella.17 

The Sources 
The results of the request to please check 
all sources of information considered 
important to research are presented in 
table 1. 

The question closest to this in the Stieg 
survey asked historians to identify their 
most frequently used sources. The rank 
order of the first three types of sources 
was identical: books, journals, and manu-
scripts ranked first, second, and third in 
both. In the years since the Stieg study, 
dissertations appear to have increased 
in perception of utility, newspapers have 
slipped slightly, and government docu-
ments remain the same. Because other for-

http:umbrella.17
http:build.16
http:historians.15


      
  

      

     

   

     
    

     

    

   
    

    
   

   
       

    
     

     

   
 

     

    
   

   

    

     
     

     
     

      
     
      

     
    
     

      
       

     
      

       
     

       
      

       

 

Historians and Their Information Sources 405 

TABLE 1 
Materials Considered Important for 

Research 
Materials Total Percentage 
Books 274 99% 
Journal articles 273 98% 
Manuscripts, archives, 
and special collections 

262 94% 

Dissertations 241 87% 
Newspapers 201 72% 
Government documents 187 67% 
Photographs 172 62% 
Maps 169 61% 
Publications of scholarly 
organizations 

167 60% 

Web sites 162 58% 
Conference proceedings 150 54% 
Oral interviews 121 44% 
Statistical sources 116 42% 
Audiovisual materials 107 38% 
Artifacts or museum 
pieces 

83 30% 

Genealogical sources 65 23% 

mats included in the two surveys differed 
somewhat, direct comparisons between 
them are not possible. What does appear 
clear, however, is that historians are more 
open to information sources beyond the 
traditional printed sources than they were 
a generation ago. In the present survey 
audiovisual materials were considered 
important to their research by 38 percent 
of the respondents. 

When historians in the present survey 
were asked to distinguish between the 
materials they used most frequently 
for primary information and those they 
used most frequently for secondary in-
formation, a more differentiated picture 
emerged. Sources used most frequently 
for primary information by ten or more 
historians were, in descending order, 
archives, manuscripts and special collec-

tions, books, newspapers, govern-
ment documents, journal articles, oral 
interviews, photographs or images, 
artifacts or museum pieces, pub-
lished primary documents, statistical 
sources, and audiovisual materials. 
Those used by ten or more for second-
ary information were books, journal 
articles, dissertations, and Web sites. 
The incorporation of nonprint ma-
terials into their research, and the 
emergence of digital information is 
apparent. (Web sites were cited as 
a source of primary information by 
seven historians.) 

Citation analysis amplifies this 
picture based on historians’ percep-
tions. In the citation analysis of 2001 
materials, books ranked first in terms 
of frequency of citation, manuscripts 
second, and journal articles third. 
Government documents were the 
next most-used category, followed 
by newspapers. All other categories 
were minuscule, far smaller than 
would have been predicted from the 
survey responses on the question of 

importance. 
Among citations to primary sources, 

primary printed sources were more 
numerous than manuscript sources, a 
somewhat surprising statistic in view 
of the close identification of primary 
sources with manuscripts in the per-
ception of historians. In the category 
of secondary information, books and 
a r t i c l e s we r e o ve r w h e l m i n g l y t h e 
leading sources. When looking only 
at secondary information, books at 82 
percent were perceived in the survey as 
somewhat more important sources of 
information than articles at 70 percent. 
The figures in the 2001 citation analysis 
suggest a larger discrepancy; 75.9 per-
cent of the secondary citations were to 
books, 18.3 percent to articles.18 Similar 
ratios of books to journals are found 

http:articles.18


      
       

 
      

     
      

      
       

      
       

       
       

     
        

      
     

       
         

     
       

       
      
        

       
  

      

       

     

        

 

     
    

      
     

 
       

     
   

      
  

   
  

 

  
 

  
  

 

 

    

 406 College & Research Libraries September 2004 

TABLE 2 
Citation of Secondary Literature 

1975 % Total % Secondary 2001 % Total % Secondary 
Books 259 26.0 84.0 376 34.7 73.1 
Articles  36  3.6 11.7  91  8.4 17.7 
Chapters in books  13  1.3  4.2  47  4.3  9.1 
Total secondary 308 34.9 514 47.4 
Total citations 995 1,083 

in other citation studies, regardless of 
the dates of the publications that were 
analyzed.19 

Is the balance between books and 
articles changing? There have been sug-
gestions that the importance of articles 
has been increasing and, if importance 
is defined as frequency of use, the 
citation data provide support for this 
perception.20 As shown in table 2, in 
1975, articles were 3.6 percent of the 
total citations and 11.7 percent of the 
citations to secondary information. In 
2001, they were 8.4 percent of the total 
citations and 17.7 percent of the sec-
ondary citations. When the secondary 
material that appeared as a chapter in 
a book is factored in, the growth in the 
citation of article-length publications is 
even greater. Chapters in books were 1.3 
percent of the total 1975 citations and 
4.2 percent of the secondary citations; 
the 2001 figures were 4.3 percent of the 
total citations and 9.1 percent of the 
secondary citations. 

TABLE 3 
Importance of Secondary Literature According 

to Age of Historian 

Age 
Total 

Responses 
Equally 
Important 

More 
Important 

Less 
Important 

30–39 57 81% 14% 5% 
40–49 50 72% 18% 10% 
50–59 75 76% 21% 3% 
60–69 64 62% 22% 16% 
70+ 11 64% 27% 9% 

Although the extent of this shift in 
balance should not be overstated, a trend 
does appear to be emerging. One factor 
that favors the production of articles is an 
increased importance of currency in his-
torical research.21 Books have an essential 
role in providing context, but articles do 
the same thing (if less comprehensively) 
and do it faster. As every author of a 
book knows, it takes a lot longer to write 
a book and get it published than it does 
to bring an article to the light of day. A 
second factor favoring articles is ease of 
publication, a factor that has nothing to 
do with intellectual considerations. In a 
pa ern going back a century, scholars 
have created periodicals in ever-more-
specialized areas to meet their need to 
publish; the proliferation of journals is 
a cliché of library literature.22 Scholarly 
book publishing, on the other hand, is dis-
advantaged by a confluence of economic 
factors, the most important being the 
considerable reduction in what academic 
libraries spend on books. The priorities of 

the historians, most 
o f w h o m a r e e m -
ployed by universi-
ties, also are a factor. 
Publication expecta-
tions for tenure have 
risen steadily, and 
many universities 
have instituted some 
kind of posttenure 
review. Given these 
constraints, writing 

http:literature.22
http:research.21
http:perception.20
http:analyzed.19


      

      

    

 
 

    

    

   

    
   

   
   

     
    

      
    

     

    
     

   
     

       
    

    
     

     
      

    
      

     
     

      
      

        
         

        
        

       
       

     
       
      

        
      

      
        

Historians and Their Information Sources 407 

articles rather than books is a rational 
choice: an article requires a much smaller 
investment. If an article is rejected, less 
has been lost than if a book manuscript 
has been rejected. In addition, the citation 
of an article takes up the same amount of 
space on a résumé’s list of publications 
as a book, enhancing the impression of 
quantity, that American shibboleth.23 

A real shi , and one of some signifi-
cance, also has occurred in the relation-
ship between primary and secondary 
information. As Nicholas J. Morgan and 
Richard H. Trainor noted, generalizations 
about the past have become more impor-
tant. The presence or absence of 
citations to significant previous 
scholarship in a historical study 
is a basis for judging its value. In 
Tibbo’s study, all the historians 
she interviewed considered the 
citation of previous scholarship 
important, 68 percent considered 
it essential. To the question in 
the present study of whether 
historians felt that secondary lit-
erature was more important, less 
important, or equally important 
as it had been when they received 
their doctorates, the older the 
historian, the more likely the re-
sponse was to be more important 
(table 3).24 

Evidence from citation analysis 
confirms that the importance of 
secondary literature (importance 
again being defined as frequency 
of use) has been increasing. In the 
analysis of 2001 prize-winning 
books and high-impact journals, 
47.4 percent of the citations ana-
lyzed were to secondary material, 
whereas in the 1975 analysis, the 
percentage of secondary material 
was only 34.9 percent. Growth in 
the raw number of citations sug-
gests the same thing, although 

without analysis of every citation one can-
not achieve certainty. Those figures were 
an average of 1,108 citations per book in 
2001 versus 1,020 per book in 1975 and an 
average of 97 citations per article in 2001, 
as compared with 66 citations per article in 
1975. Within a citation there was also great-
er density. Five hundred citations in 1975 
materials produced 995 references; the 
same number of citations in 2001 produced 
1,083 references. M. Sara Lowe observed 
the same growth in numbers in her citation 

25 analysis of the American Historical Review. 
This growth probably can be a ributed 
partly to the simple fact that, thanks to 

TABLE 4 
Most Frequent Way of Discovering Pri-

mary Information 
Method of Discovery Total Percentage 
Finding aids 64 26% 
Footnotes 50 20% 
Archival/library catalogs 49 20% 
In the archives 47 19% 
Bibliographies 28 11% 
Bibliographic databases 19 8% 
Conversations with other 
historians 

12 5% 

Archivists 10 4% 
Web sites 7 3% 
Reference librarians 6 2% 
Archival research 5 2% 
Specialized bibliographies 5 2% 
Legal citations 4 2% 
Oral interviews 4 2% 
Consulting experts 3 1% 
Newspapers 3 1% 
Government indexes 3 1% 
Library 2 1% 
Reviews 1 0% 
Amateur historians 1 0% 
Local history offices 1 0% 
While reading other sources 1 0% 

http:shibboleth.23


    
     

      
     

      
    

      
      

     
    

      
   

      
  

   
    

      
  

      
     
     

       
      

    
     

     
      
      

      
      

      
      
        

    

     
    

    
       

     
     

       
      

      
      

      

     
       

      
       

    
    

      
        

 

 408 College & Research Libraries September 2004 

the steadily increasing pressures 
to publish, more literature is pro-
duced relevant to any given topic 
and partly to the advancing domi-
nance of the scientific model in 
American academic life. Moreover, 
this growth makes it more difficult 
than it already was for academic 
historians to pretend that they 
write for Everyman—an ambition 
of historians in the formative years 
of the discipline—because Every-
man is allergic to footnotes and 
what they represent.26 

Historians perceive themselves 
as using microfilm; almost two-
thirds said they used it sometimes. 
“Infrequently” is probably more 
accurate. Of the 1,080 references of 
2001 books and articles analyzed, 
only two were to microfilm. (Mi-
crofilm was not used as a category 
in the analysis by format; the ref-
erence was, instead, categorized 
by its original format [e.g., manu-
script]. However, when an item 
was used in microform, that fact 
was noted and those notes enabled 
the above statement to be made.) 
Microfilm does not seem to have 
become more liked in the years 
since the Stieg study; one historian 
tried to use it “as li le as humanly 
possible. It gives me migraines.” 

Discovering Information 
Because of the great dispersion 
of potentially useful material, 
historians face a particularly chal-
lenging problem that they solve with an 
assortment of approaches. When asked 
how they found information, more 
tended to check book reviews than any 
other alternative. When asked how they 
located primary material, the four most 
frequently used methods were, in order, 
finding aids, footnotes, and references in 

TABLE 5 
Most Frequent Way of Discovering 

Secondary Information 
Method of Discovery Total Percentage 
Bibliographic databases 57 23% 
Reading other sources 54 21% 
Footnotes, references, notes, 
and bibliographies in other 
works 

54 21% 

Library catalogs 47 19% 
Bibliographies (unspecified) 38 15% 
Book reviews, new books, 
& journal listings 

34 13% 

Specialized bibliographies 10 4% 
Colleagues, academic 
experts 

9 4% 

Browsing the library stacks 7 3% 
Publisher catalogs 7 3% 
Using the library 5 2% 
Librarians 5 2% 
Conference publications & 
participation at conferences 

4 2% 

By accident 3 2% 
Dissertations 3 2% 
Archival-finding aids 2 1% 
World of mouth 2 1% 
General reference works 1 0% 
Online discussion lists 1 0% 
Hunches 1 0% 
Commercial bookstores 1 0% 
Personal knowledge 1 0% 
Local historians 1 0% 
Friends 1 0% 

other sources, archival and library cata-
logs, and during research in a collection. 
(See table 4.) For secondary information, 
the four most frequent ways were using 
bibliographic databases, reading other 
sources, footnotes, references, and bib-
liographies in other works, and library 
catalogs. (See table 5.) Only a very few 

http:represent.26


    
      
     
    

     
     

   
   

      
    
     
      

     

     
      

      

    

    

      
     

    
 

   
     

        

     
     

      

     

     
   

   
    

   

    
      

   
    

   
      
    

     
 

    

    

 

 

Historians and Their Information Sources 409 

historians identified colleagues or li-
brarians as their most frequently used 
method of finding relevant information, 
whether primary or secondary infor-
mation, although colleagues and other 
historians were considered slightly more 
useful than librarians. 

Systematic bibliographic searches in 
databases, use of other sources such as 
aids designed to disseminate informa-
tion about resources, and careful, patient, 
wide reading followed by pursuit of leads 
resulting from the reading are clearly 
the foundation of historical research; the 
package was summarized by one histo-
rian as “diligence.” The methods used 
have not changed in a generation, but 
the relative frequencies have. In the Stieg 
survey, the five most common ways of 
discovering published information were, 
in descending order, bibliographies or 
references in books or journals, special-
ized bibliographies, book reviews, library 
catalogs, and abstracts or indexes. When 
these results are compared with table 5, 

TABLE 6 
Most Frequently Used Indexes, 

Abstracting Services, and Specialized 
Bibliographies 

Title of Source Total Percentage 
America, History and 
Life (ABC-CLIO) 

40 20% 

Historical Abstracts  
(ABC-CLIO) 

37 18% 

WorldCat (OCLC) 31 15% 
JSTOR 19 9% 
International Medieval 
Bibliography (IMB) 

9 4% 

Various Library Catalogs 7 4% 
Isis Current Bibliography 
of the History of Science 

6 3% 

Academic Search Elite 
(EBSCOhost) 

6 3% 

Project Muse 5 3% 
L’Année philologique 5 3% 

it is clear that, as Tibbo predicted, histo-
rians are making greater use of formal 
bibliographic tools and relying less on 
their own bibliographic knowledge, book 
reviews, browsing, and colleagues.27 

Historians showed considerably great-
er knowledge of indexes and abstracts 
than they did in the Stieg study. The Stieg 
survey offered respondents a selection of 
commonly used titles to check, with an 
option of adding more titles; the results 
made it apparent that many historians 
checked titles they thought they ought 
to be using or those with names they rec-
ognized. The Reader’s Guide, that staple of 
school library instruction, was the single 
most frequently checked index. In the 
present survey, no checklist was offered 
so that if a respondent named a title, it is 
probable that it really was one on which 
he or she depended. The top ten results 
to the question which indexes, abstracting 
services, specialized, or history-related 
bibliographies they used most o en are 
presented in table 6. 

These indexes, abstracting services, 
and bibliographies are a mixture 
of broad multidisciplinary, gen-
eral historical, interdisciplinary, and 
specialized resources, all of which 
meet some aspect of the needs of 
historians. America, History and 
Life, and Historical Abstracts were 
designed specifically for historians; 
they abstract books as well as a 
wide range of historical journals 
and historical articles from journals 
in other fields. Sources of greater 
disciplinary breadth are JSTOR and 
ProjectMuse, which both give access 
to large back files of scholarly articles 
in many disciplines, although they 
are not normally considered indexes. 
WorldCat is the single largest listing 
of book material in the world and of-
fers not only subject access, but also 
keyword access, a feature essential 

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 410 College & Research Libraries 

in a field where vocabulary control is 
problematic. Not only in this question, 
but throughout the survey, respondents 
expressed appreciation of WorldCat. As 
one individual stated, “WorldCat rules!” 
The specialized bibliographies in table 6 
differ from the twenty-five others named 
by respondents only in that they were 
named o en enough to make the cutoff 
point of three percent. 

History is o en referred to as an inter-
disciplinary discipline and the sources in 
table 6 confirm the validity of the descrip-
tion. Moreover, it is a description that 
accords with the results of the citation 
analysis. Secondary material cited ranged 
literally from A to Z in the Library of Con-
gress classification scheme. In addition to 
the D, E, and F categories for history, cited 
material came from, among others, the 
categories applied to philosophy, psychol-
ogy, anthropology, economics, sociology, 
political science, education, art, language 
and literature, science, agriculture, tech-
nology, and military and naval science.28 

The breadth of the discipline of history is 
both cause and effect of the information 
sources used by its practitioners. The ab-
sence of highly specialized indexes from 
nonhistorical fields indicates the limits of 
that breadth. 

Additional comments on the survey 
questions about how information is dis-
covered reinforced the data given in the 
tables and sometimes extended the data. 
Many historians emphasized the impor-
tance of following footnote and reference 
trails from other research. One wrote in 
capitals, “THE KEY.”29 The value of the 
human element also was affirmed; friends 
and acquaintances, collectors, partici-
pants in contemporary history, amateur 
historians, and the nonprofessional staff 
in archives were mentioned specifically 
as useful sources. 

One follow-up question asked the 
historians whether quality, availability, 

September 2004 

or ease of use most affected their choice 
of an information source. Most reported 
that quality was the most important 
consideration, although several made 
the worthwhile point that quality was of 
li le relevance if the source was unavail-
able. The historians, however, did seem 
willing to exert themselves to obtain what 
they regarded as necessary. They defined 
quality in a bibliographic source princi-
pally in terms of coverage; accuracy and 
organization also were concerns. 

Serendipity, when the meaning of the 
word is extended beyond the dictionary’s 
definition as the gi  of finding something 
valuable that was not sought to include 
the finding of something not known, but 
hoped for, plays a significant role in his-
torical research. Browsing is an invitation 
to opportunity and was a frequent method 
of choice. Browsing usually meant scan-
ning library shelves in an area that was 
a logical, but not guaranteed, location of 
information; but sometimes the browsing 
was electronic, a practice called “keyword 
spelunking” by one historian.30 Few of 
the survey respondents could recall a 
specific occasion, but many testified to 
its value. One historian did recall an oc-
casion when a book’s cover induced him 
to pick up the book. The book turned out 
to be a listing of the personal library of an 
individual about whom he was writing a 
paper. Considerably later, the historian 
realized the opportunities such a source 
provided and used it to prove his hypoth-
esis. Serendipity may not happen o en, 
but when it does, it is likely to turn up 
something of major importance.31 

Electronic Sources 
Although earlier writers could say that 
the use of electronic sources by human-
ists was limited, the combination of easy 
access and databases that truly serve the 
needs of humanists has changed that.32 

The catalogs of many research libraries 

http:importance.31
http:historian.30
http:science.28


     
    

    

   

    
      

    

      
  

     

   
    

    
     

     
    

   

     
     

    
    

   
     

   
  
    

   

 

     

 

 

Historians and Their Information Sources 411 

were already available, but in the 
past five years networked data-
bases, usually with remote access, 
have become the norm in academic 
libraries. These databases include 
not only digital versions of indexing 
and abstracting services, but also 
a host of products such as JSTOR, 
Early English Books Online, Acces-
sible Archives, and North American 
Women’s Le ers and Diaries.33 Most 
of the historians in this survey used 
electronic sources readily, although 
16 percent, or one in six, indicated 
that they used electronic databases 
rarely or never. 

The responses to a question to 
name the electronic databases most 
frequently used were very similar to 
the sources most frequently used to 
discover secondary information. (See 
table 7.) Most historians depended 
primarily on the library of their own 
institution for the delivery of these 
electronic databases. 

Comprehensiveness is clearly the 
highest priority in searching a database. 
When asked whether they preferred 

TABLE 8 
When a Search Yields Too Many Hits… 

Total Percentage 
I think of new terminology to use 
in my search. 

158 57% 

I go through all records retrieved 
not wanting any citations to fall 
through the cracks. 

93 33% 

I try to choose those citations from 
the most respected journals in the 
profession. 

59 21% 

I choose the most current citations. 50 18% 
I start over. 49 18% 
I ask a librarian to show me how 
to perform an effective search in 
that particular database. 

28 10% 

I look for another database from 
which to do the same search. 

19 7% 

TABLE 7 
Most Frequently Used Electronic 

Databases 
Database Title Total Percentage 
America, History and Life 
(ABC-CLIO) 

59 28% 

JSTOR 51 24% 
WorldCat (OCLC) 37 18% 
Project Muse 30 14% 
None 25 12% 
Historical Abstracts 
(ABC-CLIO) 

22 10% 

Library Catalogs 9 4% 
Rarely Use Them 8 4% 
LexisNexis 8 4% 
History Cooperative 7 4% 
Expanded Academic 
ASAP (InfoTrac) 

7 4% 

ITER Bibliography 6 3% 
ProQuest 6 3% 
Early English Books 
Online–EEBO 

5 2% 

depth, described as “retrieval of the 
largest number of records which might 

pertain to my topic and in 
which I must spend time 
filtering out irrelevant cita-
tions,” or relevance, defined 
as “retrieval of a few records, 
all of them relevant to my 
topic, but with the chance 
that many other works might 
fall through the cracks, due 
to the limiting parameters 
of this type of search,” 70 
percent of the respondents 
chose depth. Historians 
would seem to disagree with 
Hernon’s assertion that the 
assumption that more infor-
mation is be er is false.34 

Although actual searches 
would need to be analyzed to 

http:false.34
http:Diaries.33


    
     

     
    

     
     

   
     

       
     

       
     

  
    
     

    
   

     
     

   
    

   

    
    

    
   

    
    

  
    

    
    

     
   

    
   

    
     

  

    
    

      

    

    

     

       

    
     

 412 College & Research Libraries September 2004 

obtain precise information about search 
strategies in electronic databases, the 
survey did yield some information on 
the topic. For the historians in the survey, 
subject searching tends to mean keyword 
searching rather than subject headings 
or descriptors, an approach suited to the 
event, person, and topically oriented char-
acter of historical writing.35 And when 
their searches produce “too many hits,” 
they report that they proceed in the ways 
shown in table 8. 

The problems they experienced with 
electronic sources were primarily with 
the scope and indexing of the source, 
secondarily related to equipment or so -
ware. One third of the complaints related 
to scope: sources did not 
include needed informa-
tion or resources; sources 
did not cover the dates 
needed; sources were not 
international enough, or 
as some put it, too anglo-
phone; sources did not offer 
full text. Another third were 
dissatisfied with the index-
ing terminology or indexing 
in general. Problems identi-
fied that related to equip-
ment or so ware included 
poor search engines, slow 
response time, difficulty in 
navigation, and frequent 
format or interface changes. 
Remaining problems do not 
fit into any particular cat-
egory. The most frequently 
mentioned was simple lack 
of access to needed data-
bases. (See table 9.) Absence 
of international standards 
also was mentioned, and 
a few historians acknowl-
edged that the fundamental 
problem was their own lack 
of knowledge. 

Historians find electronic sources more 
helpful in locating secondary information 
than in locating primary materials. In the 
survey, 90 percent described them as very 
helpful or sometimes helpful in locating 
secondary information; only 61 percent 
used the same terms with relation to pri-
mary information. Those preferring the 
electronic format in indexes outnumbered 
by two to one those preferring the print 
format; almost a third are indifferent. 
Preference was age related; the older the 
historian, the likelier he or she was to 
prefer print. 

Almost two-thirds (64%) used the 
Internet from home, and responses to 
the question about which Web sites were 

TABLE 9 
Problems Encountered Using Databases 

Problems Total Percentage 
What they exclude 17 18% 
Terminology 13 13% 
Too many hits, irrelevant citations 13 13% 
Poor search engines/options 11 11% 
Too slow 10 10% 
Hard to operate/navigate 9 9% 
Access problems 7 7% 
Does not include needed dates 7 7% 
Poor indexing 7 7% 
Technical problems 6 6% 
No consistency among databases 5 5% 
Not international enough in scope 5 5% 
Personal lack of knowledge 4 4% 
Not full text 3 3% 
Too many format/interface changes 2 2% 
Multidisciplinary nature of the field 2 2% 
Ergonomically uncomfortable 1 1% 
Errors 1 1% 
Lack of browsability 1 1% 
Cost 1 1% 
Discrepancy between those who 
make them and those who use them 

1 1% 

http:writing.35


    
       

      

      
    

     

    
    

        

      
    

      
      

      
     

     
         

    
     

     
     

    

   
     

    

    
      

        

     
       

      

      

     
       

    

    
      

 

   
     

      
     

   
     

      

     

 
     

    
    

    
     

      
     

    
    

Historians and Their Information Sources 413 

most o en visited showed considerable 
familiarity with the range of possibilities. 
Among the leaders were Web sites that of-
fer the possibility of information about or 
acquisition of information sources, such 
as the online catalogs of libraries or the 
site of a bookseller. Web sites affiliated 
with scholarly institutions were popu-
lar. The single most frequently visited 
Web site listed was that of the Library of 
Congress; its American Memory Histori-
cal Collection was identified specifically 
seven times. Listservs, news-type services 
for historians, and individual publications 
such as the New York Times or the American 
Historical Review also were mentioned. 

Historians have worked to acquire their 
expertise with electronic information. 
They have taught themselves and learned 
from librarians and colleagues; some have 
attended workshops. The myth of the 
younger generation teaching the older 
appears where historians are concerned 
to be just that, a myth. Only five percent 
report learning from their children. 

When assessing the impact of elec-
tronic resources on their research, one-
quarter of the historians responding to 
the survey considered that electronic 
sources had had li le impact on their re-
search; one individual dismissed them as 
a time-waster. However, most were highly 
appreciative. Many offered a comment 
that was a variation on “I can’t imagine 
researching without them.” They stressed 
the speed of electronic sources, the greatly 
increased access to information, and the 
saving of time and money. As one put it, 
“I get to spend more time in my office 
and actually get work done!” Those who 
complained that they were not useful 
in their field look forward eagerly to a 
day when they will be. To a considerable 
degree, awareness of the potential of elec-
tronic resources has raised expectations. 
One individual, who did feel that they 
had had a great deal of impact on his or 

her research, pointed out that when you 
found a citation, you still had to go a er 
it in the old-fashioned way. 

Historians used the Internet in teach-
ing cautiously. Almost all respondents al-
lowed use of Web sites for student assign-
ments, but almost two-thirds established 
some guidelines or limitations. The most 
frequently recommended site was that 
of the Library of Congress, primarily for 
its American Memory collection and the 
Handbook of Latin American Studies. 
The National Archives Web site and those 
of the New York Times and PBS also were 
named by more than one historian. 

Electronic publications also were 
treated with caution. Only 10 percent 
subscribe to any journal online, and only 
six percent subscribe to an e-journal, that 
is, an electronic journal with no print 
counterpart. Doubts about the role of 
e-journals in scholarly communication 
prevailed; more than half considered it 
too early to judge their value, whereas 
29 percent did not consider publication 
in them as authoritative as publication in 
a print journal. Of the six e-journals men-
tioned, three are published at universities. 
These results were similar to those in the 
Canadian survey of social scientists and 
humanists in 1999–2000.36 It is certainly 
true that leading scholars have rarely 
chosen to publish in them. 

Issues and Problems 
When asked in the follow-up questions 
about any information problem they had 
experienced in their present research, 
many historians responded with some 
version of inadequate access. Assorted 
difficulties included that their own library 
did not have a good newspaper collection, 
did not subscribe to crucial databases, 
and did not have needed older material 
because the university was only twenty 
years old. Electronic databases were 
criticized as shallow—better suited to 

http:1999�2000.36


  
   

        
  

     
      

    

      

       

    

     

     

    

      
    

     

      
      

    

   
     

      
     
     

    
    

     

     

    

     

     
    

     

     

      

 

      
     

  
     

   

     
     

    
      

       
      

     

       

     
       

    
   

 414 College & Research Libraries 

undergraduates than scholarship—and 
for inadequate indexing terminology. 
They required expertise the respondents 
did not have to make full use of them. 
Foreign-language materials presented 
problems; they were absent from collec-
tions, absent from databases, and difficult 
to use. One historian deplored his or 
her inability to read a source; a Russian 
scholar described the transliteration of 
Russian as a “mess.” 

Other problems clustered around ac-
cess to primary sources. Many found that 
to see the material they needed, they had 
to travel. Worse, they might be denied ac-
cess to material needed for their research 
because of political or governmental 
restrictions. 

When asked to describe an occasion 
when they had chosen not to seek infor-
mation from a source (person, library, 
index, bibliography, Internet, etc.), even 
when they believed that information 
relevant to their research might be avail-
able from that source, few could recall 
any such experience. However, several 
mentioned that they had called a halt to 
research when they felt they had enough 
to write, even if other sources promised 
to yield additional information. Some had 
tailored their research topics to minimize 
travel. Quality was a consideration; one 
historian, skeptical of the value of the 
Internet, avoided it and others did not 
use information from historians they 
considered unreliable. 

Relationships with librarians were 
mixed. Librarians may not be viewed 
as hod-carriers, as they were in 1970, 
but historians balanced praise, such as 
for an interlibrary loan office’s success, 
with complaints about rudeness and 
a mechanistic, “scripted” approach to 
reference work. More serious are the 
problems arising from the difference in 
disciplinary culture. In 1984, Stephen K. 
Stoan analyzed the lack of understanding 

September 2004 

between teaching faculty and librarians: 
teaching faculty claimed that librarians 
did not understand research, and librar-
ians accused faculty of not knowing 
how to use the library. In 1991, Stephen 
Lehmann and Patricia E. Renfro described 
a related contrast, characterizing human-
ists as primarily interested in content 
and librarians as primarily interested in 
process and technique. This divergence is 
now less acute, as the arrival of electronic 
databases has forced historians to be more 
interested in the means of access, but it 
has not completely disappeared.37 

Conclusions 
Comparing the results of this study with 
those of the 1981 Stieg study demon-
strates that although much related to 
historians’ information-seeking habits 
has changed, many things have remained 
the same. In research, informal means of 
locating information, especially refer-
ences in the works of other scholars and 
book reviews, continue to be prominent. 
Browsing is still important. Print remains 
the principal format of the information 
used, although electronic databases are 
used extensively in the discovery of infor-
mation, and books still dominate the dis-
cipline. This domination of print is even 
clearer in the citation analysis than in the 
survey results. It is still true to describe 
the physical library as the laboratory of 
the historian, a role that explains much of 
the heavy use of WorldCat. E-journals are 
used rarely; most historians are uncertain 
of their value and thus of their reliability 
as sources of information. 

One important change that has taken 
place is that catalog and index use has 
grown and promises to continue to grow. 
The increased use of bibliographic sources 
has its roots in both need and availability. 
Need there has been as long as there has 
been historical scholarship; the great 
Dahlmann-Waitz bibliography of Ger-

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Historians and Their Information Sources 415 

man historical writing was begun in 1830, 
Writings on American History soon a er 
American history began to be studied, at 
the beginning of the twentieth century. 
Use of such bibliographic tools, however, 
was limited, unless the scope of the tools 
coincided with the historian’s specialty, 
as the Isis bibliography did with the in-
terests of historians of science. The focus 
of research was on primary resources, 
which could not be identified through 
bibliographies and indexes, rather than 
on secondary materials. Now many bib-
liographic resources exist, immediately 
visible on the desktop of any scholar who 
connects to the library of the institution 
with which he or she is affiliated. These 
bibliographic sources are easy and con-
venient, and require a much smaller 
investment of time than going through 
comparable printed indexes. Concurrent 
with the improvement of the cost-benefit 
ratio of a bibliographic search, the need 
for such searches has grown, as scholarly 
writing in almost every field of history 
threatens to become overwhelming. At 
a time when being informed about the 
literature is more important than ever, 
historians find it increasingly difficult to 
keep up with the scholarship in their areas 
of specialization.38 The use of indexes 
and bibliographies is an obvious solu-
tion to the difficulties created by these 
circumstances. 

How knowledgeable historians are 
about bibliographic databases, almost all 
of which are now in electronic format, is 
unclear, although the fact that they have 
enough understanding of the scope of da-
tabases to choose such relevant ones as are 
indicated in table 6 is a very positive sign. 
They use a wide range of databases, but 
this dispersion reflects the wide spread of 
the discipline. Only four databases were 
used by more than 10 percent. 

Another area in which the evidence is 
unclear is that of historians’ connectedness 

with their professional community. Histo-
rians traditionally have worked alone and 
multi-authored publications are rare; in 
this study, none of the five books analyzed 
in the 2001 citation analysis and only six 
of the ninety-five articles, or 6.3 percent, 
had more than one author.39 On the other 
hand, more than half found talking to 
colleagues an occasion when informa-
tion was serendipitously discovered and 
a few identified talking to colleagues as 
their most frequent way of discovering 
information for their research. In addi-
tion, some participate in listservs. 

In 1984, in an investigation that largely 
focused on historians, Hernon suggested 
that social scientists were suffering from 
information overload. In the intervening 
twenty years, the potential for contract-
ing this indisposition has only increased 
exponentially.40 If those who participated 
in the survey are representative, however, 
historians themselves only rarely feel 
inundated by too much information. 
Out of the many comments, only three 
even hinted at such a feeling. Instead, 
the complaints were that a database did 
not go back far enough, that there was no 
appropriate database in the individual’s 
field, that the database did not contain the 
full text of a document, that the library did 
not have a good enough newspaper col-
lection, that a library did not subscribe to 
enough databases, or some other expres-
sion of a desire for more. One can only 
conclude that the fundamental problem 
of historical research, finding enough 
information about the problem under 
investigation to come to appropriate 
conclusions, remains, although the means 
of locating information have improved so 
much. Is it a case of the more they have, 
the more they want? Those collection de-
velopment officers who think historians 
are insatiable may just be right. 

Overall, the information needs of his-
torians appear to be be er served than 

http:exponentially.40
http:author.39
http:specialization.38


     
      

       

    
    

   
     

    

 
 

              

 
 

 
  

             
 

              

  

               

                

             

           
 

 

 

 416 College & Research Libraries 

they were a generation ago. Bibliographic 
sources have improved in quantity and in 
their fit with the needs of historians. They 
are easier to use. At the same time, his-
torians have become more sophisticated 
about information sources. They have 
always understood their own information 
needs but now translate them more eas-

September 2004 

ily into what the bibliographic universe 
offers. The near-universal accessibility 
to library catalogs and the availability 
of keyword searching in most electronic 
databases are greatly appreciated. In 
short, historians are well on their way to 
becoming the new user called for by the 
new technologies and new products.41 

Notes 

1. Lord Chesterfield to his son, February 5, 1750, in The Le ers of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 
4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London: Eyre and Spo iswoode, 1932), v. 4, Le ers: 
1748–1751, 1501; John Cannon, “The Historian at Work,” in The Historian at Work (London: George 
Allen & Unwin, 1980), 2. 

2. Jeffrey G. Barlow, “Historical Research and Electronic Evidence: Problems and Promises,” 
in Writing, Teaching, and Researching History in the Electronic Age, ed. Dennis A. Trinkle (Armonk, 
N.Y.; London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 196; historian’s quotation from Barbara C. Orbach, “The View 
from the Researcher’s Desk: Historians’ Perceptions of Research and Repositories,” American 
Archivist 54 (winter 1991): 29; Ross Atkinson, “Humanities Scholarship and the Library,” LRTS 
39 (1995): 82. 

3. U.S. Dept. of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2002–03 ed., 
available online at h p://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos054.htm (accessed 2 September 2003), s.v. Social 
Scientists, Other. In the term “primary sources,” primary is used in the sense of first in order of 
time or development. In the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, primary 
sources are described as the wri en material produced more or less contemporaneously with the 
object of research, ideally recorded by eyewitnesses, although practicing historians today use it, 
as does the Occupational Outlook Handbook, for any source of evidence that provides them with 
direct, unmediated information about the object of study. International Encyclopedia of Social and 
Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Bates (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), s.v. “History: 
Theories and Methods,” by C. Lorenz, v. 10, 6871. 

4. Constance C. Gould, Information Needs in the Humanities: An Assessment (Stanford, Calif.: 
Research Libraries Group, 1988), 7–14; Helen R. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the 
Humanities: Providing Access to Historical Literature (Chicago: ALA, 1993), 4–7. 

5. Margaret F. Stieg, “The Information of [sic] Needs of Historians,” College & Research Libraries 
42 (1981): 549–60. 

6. The years 2001 and 1975 were the target dates, but the prizes were not consistent in 
whether they were for books published in the year the prize was awarded or for one published 
in the preceding year. Some prizes were not awarded every year, but in alternate years. The 
prizes used to provide the books for analysis were the Herbert Baxter Adams prize in European 
history, ancient history to 1815; the George Louis Beer prize for European international history 
since 1895; the Albert J. Beveridge prize for the best book in English on the history of the United 
States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present; the Howard R. Marraro prize for Ital-
ian or Italian–United States history; and the Wesley-Logan prize for African diaspora history. In 
making the choices of books and journals to analyze, several factors were present besides the 
presumption of excellence: comparability (i.e., a prize was given both in 1975 and 2000), geo-
graphic diversity of subject, and difference in time period. Greater diversity of geographic subject 
would have been preferred, but prizes for non-U.S. and non-European history are of very recent 
vintage. The absence of publications by historians working in countries other than the United 
States was accepted because the survey was limited to those working inside the United States. 
Data sets included author, title, physical format, date of publication, language, whether the item 
was a primary or secondary source, and LC classification. For citations to journal articles, the 
title of the journal also was noted and for citations from manuscripts, the repository in which the 
manuscripts were located. 

The 2001 prize books were (Adams) Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper—The Formative 
Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2000); (Beer) John Connelly, Captive 
University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel 
Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 2000); (Beveridge) Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: 
The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000); (Marraro) 

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Historians and Their Information Sources 417 

Anthony Gra on, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, 
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Pr., 2000; and (Wesley-Logan) David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the 
Americas (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1999). The journals used were the American 
Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Modern History, the Journal of African 
History, and Past and Present; the volume of a journal, it should be noted, is not always identical 
with a calendar year. The books analyzed for 1975 were (Adams) James S. Donnelly, The Land 
and People of Nineteenth-century Cork (London, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); (Beer) 
Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade 
a er World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1975); (Beveridge) David Brion Davis, The 
Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1700–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Pr., 1975); (Mar-
raro) Robert Brentano, Rome before Avignon (New York: Basic Books, 1974). For the fi h 1975 book, 
Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1974) was used. 
Hines’s book was awarded the John H. Dunning prize in U.S. history, a prize that is awarded in 
alternate years. It was selected because the Wesley-Logan award only began in 1992. The same 
journals were used. 

Fi y citations were randomly selected from each book and volume of a journal, a total of 250 
book citations and 250 citations in journal articles for each of the two periods. The total population 
from which they were randomly selected was 5,541 citations in the 2001 books and 9,259 citations 
in the 2001 articles and in the 1975 books 5,099 citations and 6,232 citations in the 1975 articles. 
That yielded a total of 531 references from the 2001 books, 552 references from the 2001 articles, 
584 references from the 1975 books, and 411 references from the 1975 articles. 

7. Donald O. Case, Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, 
and Behavior (Amsterdam: Academic Pr., 2002), xv, and especially chapters 10–12. Bibliographic 
essays on some aspect of information behavior appear regularly in the Annual Review of Informa-
tion Science and Technology. 

8. Peter Hernon, “Information Needs and Gathering Pa erns of Academic Social Scientists, 
with Special Emphasis Given to Historians and Their Use of U.S. Government Publications,” 
Government Information Quarterly 1 (1984): 401–29; Donald O. Case, “The Collection and Use of 
Information by Some American Historians: A Study of Motives and Methods,” Library Quarterly 
61 (1991): 61–82; Charles Cole, “Information Acquisition in History Ph.D. Students: Inferencing 
and the Formation of Knowledge Structures,” Library Quarterly 68 (1998): 33–54; Roberto Delga-
dillo and Beverly P. Lynch, “Future Historians: Their Quest for Information,” College & Research 
Libraries 60 (May 1999): 245–59; Rebecca Green, “Locating Sources in Humanities Scholarship: The 
Efficacy of Following Bibliographic references,” Library Quarterly 70 (2000): 201–29; Wendy M. 
Duff and Catherine A. Johnson, “Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-seeking Behavior 
of Historians in Archives,” Library Quarterly 72 (2002): 472–96. 

9. Whether history belongs with the humanities or with the social sciences is an unresolved 
question. For the record, the authors of this study consider history to have more in common with 
the humanities, although they recognize that it draws frequently upon the social sciences for 
insights and methods. Tibbo summarizes the views in Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the 
Humanities, 3, suggesting that the operative factor in determining whether the historian pursues 
a humanistic or social scientific methodology is the type of history practiced. An excellent discus-
sion of the issue can be found in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 
under “History and the Social Sciences.” 

10. Bath University Library, Investigation into Information Requirements of the Social Sciences 
(Research Report 1: Information Requirements of Researchers in the Social Sciences [June 1971]); 
Cynthia Corkill and Margaret Mann, Information Needs in the Humanities: Two Postal Surveys 
(Occasional Papers 2; British Library Research and Development Department Report, no. 5455) 
(Univ. of Sheffield: Centre for Research on User Studies, 1978); Sue Stone, “Humanities Scholars: 
Information Needs and Uses,” Journal of Documentation 38 (1982): 292–313; Susan S. Guest, “The 
Use of Bibliographic Tools by Humanities Faculty at the State University of New York at Albany,” 
Reference Librarian 18 (Summer 1987): 157–72; Stephen E. Wiberley Jr., “Habits of Humanists: 
Scholarly Behavior and New Information Technologies,” Library Hi-Tech 9 (1991): 17–21; Rebecca 
Watson-Boone, “The Information Needs and Habits of Humanities Scholars,” RQ 34 (1994): 203–16; 
Gould, Information Needs in the Humanities; Dimensions and Use of the Scholarly Information 
Environment, available online at h p://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/reports/html. 

11. Peter A. Uva, Information-Gathering Habits of Academic Historians: Report of the Pilot Study 
(Syracuse: State Univ. of New York, Upstate Medical Center, March 1977), ERIC ED 142 483; 
Orbach, “The View from the Researcher’s Desk,” 32; Case, “The Collection and Use of Informa-
tion by Some American Historians;” David Ellis, “Modeling the Information-Seeking Pa erns 
of Academic Researchers: A Grounded Theory Approach,” Library Quarterly 63 (1993): 469–86; 
Lokman I. Meho and Helen R. Tibbo, “Modeling the Information-seeking Behavior of Social 
Scientists: Ellis’s Study Revisited,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Tech-



 

 
 

            

  

 
  

 
 

          
 

         
           

 
 

 
                

 
 

 
        

 
             

 
          

 
 

 
  

 
 

       
  

 
 

    

 
     

 
 

     

             
   

 

 418 College & Research Libraries September 2004 

nology 54 (2003): 570–87; Clara M. Chu, “Literary Critics at Work and Their Information Needs: 
A Research-Phases Model,” Library and Information Science Research 21 (1999): 247–73 

12. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities. 
13. Arthur Monroe McAnally, “Characteristics of Materials Used in Research in United States 

History” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1951); Clyve Jones, Michael Chapman, and Pamela Carr 
Woods, “The Characteristics of the Literature Used by Historians,” Journal of Librarianship 4 
(1972): 137–56; M. Sara Lowe, “Reference Analysis of the American Historical Review,” Collection 
Building 22 (2003): 13–20; Rebecca A. Jacob, “A Study in Interdisciplinarity in Citations to Journal 
Literature in the Journal of American History, 1960–1990” (MSLS thesis, Univ. of North Carolina, 
Chapel Hill, 1994); Edward A. Goedeken and Jean-Pierre V. M. Herubel, “Periodical Dispersion 
in American History: Observation on Article Bibliographies from the Journal of American His-
tory,” Serials Librarian 27 (1995): 59–74; Eloise R. Hitchcock, “Materials Used in the Research of 
State History: A Citation Analysis of the 1986 Tennessee Historical Quarterly,” Collection Building 
10 (1989): 52–54; Katherine W. McCain, “Citation Pa erns in the History of Technology,” Library 
and Information Science Research 9 (Jan. 1987): 41–59; Jean-Pierre V. M. Herubel, “Materials Used in 
Historical Scholarship: A Limited Citation Analysis of the Journal of Garden History,” Collection 
Management 14 (1991): 155–62. 

14. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities; Deborah Lines Andersen, 
“Academic Historians, Electronic Information Access Technologies, and the World Wide Web: A 
Longitudinal Study of Factors Affecting Use and Barriers to that Use,” Journal of the Association 
for History and Computing 1 (1998), available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/history/jahcI1/ 
Anderson/Anderson.HTML (accessed 2 July 2003); ———, “Historians on the Web: A Study 
of Academic Historians’ Use of the World Wide Web for Teaching,” Journal of the Association for 
History and Computing 3 (2000), available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII2/AR-
TICLES/anderson/index.html (accessed 2 July 2003); Andersen and Dennis A. Trinkle, “‘One or 
Two Is Not a Problem,’ or, Technology in the Tenure, Promotion, and Review Process: A Survey of 
Current Practices in U.S. History Departments,” Journal of the Association for History and Comput-
ing 4 (2001), available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIV1/ARTICLES/Anderson-
Trinkle/Anderson-Trinkle.html; Amy Schleigh, “At the Intersection of History and Technology: A 
Bibliography for Historians and Information Professionals,” Journal of the Association for History 
and Computing 4 (November 2000), available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCV3/ 
ARTICLES/Schleigh/Schleigh.html. [Accessed 8 November 2003]; Stephen Wiberley and William 
Goodrich Jones, “Pa erns of Information Seeking in the Humanities,” College & Research Libraries 
50 (1989): 638–45; ———, “Humanists Revisited: A Longitudinal Look at the Adoption of Informa-
tion Technology,” College & Research Libraries 55 (1994): 499–509; ———, “Time and Technology: 
A Decade-long Look at Humanists’ Use of Electronic Information Technology,” College & Research 
Libraries 61 (2000): 421–31; Marcia J. Bates, “The Ge y End-user Online Searching Project in the 
Humanities: Report no. 6: Overview and Conclusions,” College & Research Libraries 57 (1996): 
514–23; Bates, Deborah N. Wilde, and Susan L. Siegfried, “Research Practices of Humanities 
Scholars in an Online Environment: The Ge y Online Searching Project Report no. 3,” Library and 
Information Science Research 17 (1995): 5–40; ———, “A Profile of End-user Searching Behavior by 
Humanities Scholars: The Ge y Online Searching Project Report no. 2,” Journal of the American 
Society for Information Science 44 (1993): 273–91; ———, “An Analysis of Search Terminology Used 
by Humanities Scholars: The Ge y Online Searching Project Report no. 1,” Library Quarterly 63 
(1993): 1–39. 

15. Available online at h p://www.ourfutureourpast.ca/e-pub/; Suzanne R. Graham, “Histori-
ans and Electronic Resources: A Citation Analysis,” JAHC (Journal of the Association for History and 
Computing) 3 (Nov. 2000), available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIII3/WORKS/ 
Graham.html (accessed 8 November 2002); ———, “Historians and Electronic Resources: A Sec-
ond Citation Analysis,” JAHC (Journal of the Association for History and Computing) 4 (Aug. 2001), 
available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIV2/ARTICLES/graham/graham.html 
(accessed 8 November 2002); ———, “Historians and Electronic Resources: Pa erns and Use,” 
Journal of the Association for History and Computing 5 (Sept. 2002), available online at h p://mcel. 
pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCV2/ARTICLES/graham/graham.html (accessed 8 November 2002); Joel 
D. Kitchens, “Electronic Publishing and the Future of History,” available online at h p://www2. 
h-net.msu.edu/~histbibl/kitchens.html; Marshall Poe, “Do We Need the UP? A New Model for 
Scholarly Publishing in History,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 4 (2001), 
available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCIV2/ARTICLES/poe/poe.html; Carol Ann 
Hughes and Nancy L. Buchanan, “Use of Electronic Monographs in the Humanities and Social 
Sciences,” Library Hi Tech 19 (2001): 368–75; Kate Wi enberg, “Digital Technology and Historical 
Scholarship: A Publishing Perspective,” Journal of the Association for History and Computing 5 (2002), 
available online at h p//mcel.pacificu.edu/JAHC/JAHCV3/ARTICLES/Wi enberg/wi enberg. 
html; Janice L. Reiff, “New Technologies and the Practice of History,” Perspectives (1998); Mark 



 
         

 
 

 
 

 
 

 

 

 
  

  

 

            

 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 
                

           

 

                

 

 
 

            

 

Historians and Their Information Sources 419 

S. Newmark, “A Call for a New Generation of Historical Web Sites,” Journal of the Association for 
History and Computer 2 (November 1999), available online at h p://mcel.pacificu.edu/jahc/jahcII3/ 
K12II3/newmark.html. [Accessed 8 November 2003]; Michael O’Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, 
“Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,” Journal of Ameri-
can History (1997); Nicholas Sarantakes, “So That a Tree May Live: What the World Wide Web 
Can and Cannot Do for Historians,” Perspectives (1999), available online at h p://www.theaha. 
org/perspectives/issues/1999/9902/9902COM3.CFM. 

16. Stone, “Humanities Scholars,” 292–95; Ron Blazek and Elizabeth Aversa, The Humanities: 
A Selective Guide to Information Sources, 5th ed. (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 2000), 2, 
4; Wiberley, “Habits of Humanists,” 17. 

17. Cf. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, 68–79. 
18. References were categorized into primary or secondary using the commonly accepted 

definitions of primary sources as records and data created during the time period being studied 
or a erwards by individuals reflecting their involvement in the events of the time and secondary 
sources as works of analysis and interpretation that build on primary sources. Ultimately, such 
judgments are subjective and contextual; a history textbook, for example, may be a secondary 
source in one publication, but a primary source in a study of how history was taught in the 
1950s. 

19. Jones, Chapman, and Woods, “The Characteristics of the Literature Used by Historians,” 
141; Lowe, “Reference Analysis of the American Historical Review,” 16. 

20. Jones, Chapman, and Woods, “The Characteristics of the Literature Used by Historians,” 
151; Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, 92. 

21. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, 92–93. 
22. Margaret F. Stieg, The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals (University, 

Ala.: Univ. of Alabama Pr., 1986), 88. 
23. A 1997 conference sponsored jointly by the American Council of Learned Societies, As-

sociation of American University Presses, and Association of Research libraries addressed many 
of these issues. From the conference proceedings, The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis: 
Or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won’t Publish My Book? ed. Mary M. Case (Washington, D.C.: As-
sociation of Research Libraries, 1999), see especially Stanley Chodorow, “The Once and Future 
Monograph,” 11–17; Marlie Wasserman, “How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Monograph and 
Why?” 33–40; Peter Nathan, “Promotion: A Triple Whammy at Research Universities,” 73–76; and 
Sanford G. Thatcher, “Thinking Systematically about the Crisis in Scholarly Communication,” 
85–94. 

24. Nicholas J. Morgan and Richard H. Trainor, “Liberator or Libertine? The Computer in the 
History Classroom,” in The Humanities and the Computer: New Directions (Oxford: Clarendon Pr; 
New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1990), 61; Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, 
130. 

25. Lowe, “Reference Analysis of the American Historical Review,” 15. 
26. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, 92. 
27. Ibid., 1–2. 
28. To be specific: AC, AP, BF, BL, BR, BX, CB, CT, D, DA, DB, DC, DD, DF, DK, DS, DT, E, F, 

G, GA, GF, GN, GV, H, HB, HC, HD, HE, HF, HG, HJ, HM, HN, HQ, HT, HV, HX, JA, JC, JF, JK, 
JL, JN, JQ, JS, JV, K, KF, KFI, KFN, KJP, LA, LB, LC, LF, ND, PA, PG, PL PN, PQ, PR, PS, PT, PZ, 
Q, S, SB, TT, TX, UH, VB, VK, Z. 

29. Historical research has several of the characteristics identified by Green as conditions in 
which footnote tracing is to be preferred to the use of indexes, the importance of primary sources, 
the spread of desired references over a long period of time, and a not particularly well-defined 
vocabulary with which to search bibliographic resources. Green, “Locating Sources in Humanities 
Scholarship,” 226. 

30. Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, refers frequently to the use of 
browsing of library shelves by historians, e.g., pp. 1, 5–6, 118–19. 

31. Barbara Tuchman’s finding of the series of articles by Stilwell on the personalities of the civil 
war in the weekly newsle er of his unit in China while doing the research for her book Stilwell 
and the American Experience in China is a fairly well-known example. Daniel Liestman, “Chance 
in the Midst of Design: Approaches to Library Research Serendipity,” RQ 31 (1992): 524. 

32. Claire-Lise Bénaud and Sever Bordeianu, “Electronic Resources in the Humanities,” Ref-
erence Services Review 23 (1995): 48; Wiberley and Jones, “Pa erns of Information Seeking in the 
Humanities,” 499; Delgadillo and Lynch, “Future Historians,” 248. 

33. A conversation with Barbara Dahlbach, former electronic services librarian at the University 
of Alabama, clarified these events. 

34. Hernon, “Information Needs and Gathering Pa erns of Academic Social Scientists, with 
Special Emphasis Given to Historians and Their Use of U.S. Government Publications,” 403. 



           

 
  

              
             

        

 

 

 

             

 
             

            
 

 420 College & Research Libraries September 2004 

35. See Tibbo, Abstracting, Information Retrieval and the Humanities, 139–41; Wiberley and Jones, 
“Pa erns of Information Seeking in the Humanities;” Bates, Wilde, and Siegfried, “An Analysis 
of Search Terminology Used by Humanities Scholars.” 

36. Available online at h p://www.ourfutureourpast.ca/e-pub/. 
37. Walter Rundell Jr., In Pursuit of American History: Research and Training in the United States 

(Oklahoma: Univ. of Oklahoma Pr., 1970), 284; Stephen K. Stoan, “Research and Library Skills: An 
Analysis and Interpretation,” College & Research Libraries 45 (Mar. 1984): 99; Stephen Lehmann and 
Patricia E. Renfro, “Humanists and Electronic Information Services: Acceptance and Resistance,” 
College & Research Libraries 52 (1991): 409. 

38. R. Stephen Humphreys, “Why Do We Write Stuff That Even Our Colleagues Don’t Want 
to Read?” in The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won’t 
Publish My Book, ed. Mary M. Case (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1999), 
21; Nicholas J. Morgan and Richard H. Trainor, “Liberator or Libertine? The Computer in the 
History Classroom,” in The Humanities and the Computer: New Directions (Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 
New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1990), 63–64. 

39. Lowe, “Reference Analysis of the American Historical Review,” 18–19. Five of the six 
articles with more than one author had two authors, one had three. 

40. Hernon, “Information Needs and Gathering Pa erns of Academic Social Scientists, with 
Special Emphasis Given to Historians and Their Use of U.S. Government Publications,” 419; Peter 
Lyman and Hal R. Varian, “How Much Information,” 2000, available online at h p://www.sims. 
berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/ (accessed 6 October 2003). 

41. David J. Staley, “From Writing to Associative Assemblages: ‘History’ in an Electronic 
Culture,” in Writing, Teaching, and Researching History in the Electronic Age, ed. Dennis A. Trinkle 
(Armonk, N.Y.; London: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 4. 



 
               

               

              

            
     
   
 
   
   

                
                

   

 
 
 

  
  

               
             

 
 
 

    

           

 
 
 

Historians and Their Information Sources 421 

APPENDIX A
	
Survey on the Information Needs of Historians
	

The Directory of American Scholars, History, was used as the source of the sample in the 
Stieg survey. Because the current edition of the directory is several years old, a more cur-
rent source for the survey population was needed for this survey. The use of the history 
departments in universities that were in the doctoral/research universities—extensive 
Carnegie classification rather than the directory meant that independent historians, 
historians employed in archives, and historians teaching in colleges were not present 
in this survey. See h p://www.carnegiefoundation.org/Classification/. 

Part A. Information Sources 
The following questions pertain to the types of materials that you use in your research 
1. 	 Please check all sources you consider to be important for your research. 
 Journal articles  Books  Manuscripts, archives, and special collections 
 Genealogical sources  Newspapers  Government documents 
 Statistical sources  Artifacts or museum pieces 
 Oral interviews (either those you have conducted or those conducted by other scholars) 
 Audio/visual materials  Maps  Photographs  Dissertations 
 Conference Proceedings  Publications of scholarly organizations  Web sites 

2. 	 Please list any other materials you consider to be important for your research. 
3.	1 Which of the above materials do you use most frequently as a source of primary information? 
4.	1 Which of the above materials do you use most frequently as a source of secondary information? 
5. 	 How o en do you use microfiche/ microfilm? 
 Frequently  Sometimes  Never 

6. 	 Do you use sources in languages other than English? 
 I use many sources in languages other than English. 
 I seldom use sources in languages other than English. 
 I do not use any sources in languages other than English. 

7. 	 How do you deal with sources in foreign languages? 
 I read the source.  I try to get a translation. 
 I search for a summary or abstract of the source.  I ignore the source. 

8.	1 Is secondary literature more important, less important, or of approximately the same importance in 
your research now as it was when you wrote your first postdissertation scholarly publication? 
 Secondary literature is more important now. 
 Secondary literature is less important now. 
 Secondary literature is equally important now. 

9. 	 Which is more important to you as a source of secondary information, books or journals? 
 Books  Journals  They are equally important.  Not sure 

Part B. Methods of Discovering Relevant Information 
1. 	 Please check all of the ways you discover information for research. 
 Abstracts, indexes, or bibliographic databases (e.g., Historical Abstracts, New York Times 

Index, Academic Search Elite) 
 Discussion with colleagues at your institution 
 Consulting experts at other institutions 
 Library catalogs at other institutions 



 
  
              

           
  
            

              
 

  
 
            

 
          

              

          

               
   

   

  
  
 
 
 
 

  
  
 

  
 

 422 College & Research Libraries	 September 2004 

 National bibliographic databases (e.g., RLIN, WorldCat) 
 Archival finding aids  Browsing the stacks in a library 
 By accident (e.g., while going through the manuscripts of an individual you discover valu-

able information on a completely different individual whom you are also investigating) 
 Book reviews  Publisher catalogs 
 Specialized bibliographies (e.g., The War of the American Revolution: A Selected Annotated 

Bibliography of Published Sources) 
 Web sites other than those relevant to the published sales of books and journals 
 Web sites of bookstores or distributors of books (e.g., Amazon.com, Schoenhof’s Foreign 

Books, Harvard University Press) 
 In used bookstores  In commercial bookstores 
 Through listservs, Internet forums, or newsgroups 
 Reference librarians in a non-archival academic or public institution (e.g., your institution’s 

main library, the Library of Congress) 
 Archivists or reference librarians in a special collections library or archive 
 Government databases, government Web sites, or printed government guides, handbooks, 

or bibliographies (e.g., GPO Access, The Monthly Catalog) 
2. 	 Please list any other ways you have discovered information for your research. 
3.	1 Which is the most frequent way you discover primary source information for your research? 
4. 	 Which is the most frequent way you discover secondary information for your research? 
5. 	 Which abstracting services, indexes, and specialized or history-related bibliographies do you 

most o en use to locate secondary literature? 
6.	1 Many indexes and abstracts are published in print and electronic form. Which do you prefer? 
 Print  Electronic (e.g., Internet, CD-ROM)  I have no preference. 

7. 	 How o en does serendipity play a role in your discovery of new information? Serendipity is 
the unintentional discovery of valuable information (by chance or luck). For example, while 
working on one topic of research, you come across valuable information for an entirely dif-
ferent topic that you also investigating. 
 Frequently  Occasionally  Never 

8. 	 When does serendipity o en occur? Please check all answers that apply. 
 Browsing the stacks in a library  While talking to colleagues or other scholars 
 Browsing the Internet  While searching for articles in an online database 
 While doing a search in an online library catalog 
 While reading works, book reviews, or other publications 
 While browsing a collection in an archive or special collections library 
 While reading messages on a listserv or online discussion forum 

Part C. Electronic Sources 
1. 	 Which databases do you use most o en (e.g., Project Muse, America: History and Life, the 

Avalon Project)? 
2. 	 How do you access these databases? Please check all answers that apply. 
 Through your institution’s library  Through your department 
 Through a personal subscription  The database is freely accessible from a Web site 
 Other 

3. 	 When I do a search in a bibliographic database, I prefer: 
 Relevance (retrieval of a few records, all of them relevant to my topic, but with the chance 

that many other works might fall through the cracks, due to the limiting parameters of 
this type of search) 

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Historians and Their Information Sources 423 

 Depth (retrieval of the largest number of records which might pertain to my topic and 
in which I must spend time filtering out irrelevant citations) 

4.	1 When a search in a bibliographic database yields too many hits: (Check all answers that apply.) 
 I start over. 
 I try to choose those citations from the most respected journals in the profession. 
 I choose the most current citations. 
 I go through all records retrieved not wanting any citations to fall though the cracks. 
 I think of new terminology to use in my search. 
 I look for another database from which to do the same search. 
 I ask a librarian to show me how to perform an effective search in that particular database. 

5. 	 Please describe any problems you have encountered using databases. 
6. 	 How o en do you use the Internet at home for professional purposes? 
 Frequently  Occasionally  Never 
 I do not have access to the Internet from home. 

7. 	 Do you personally subscribe to any journals online? 
 Yes  No 

8. 	 Do you subscribe to any E-journals? E-journals are journals that have no print counterpart 
and have been created solely for online. 
 Yes  No 

9. 	 If you answered yes to question 8, which titles do you subscribe to? 
10. Electronic journals are a new form of scholarly communication. 
 I consider a publication in an e-journal to be as authoritative as a publication in a print 

journal. 
 I do not consider publication in an e-journal to be as authoritative as publication in a 

print journal. 
 It is too soon to judge their relative value. 

11. How useful have electronic sources been in helping you to locate primary sources? 
 Very Helpful  Sometimes helpful  Rarely helpful 
 I do not use electronic sources to locate primary information. 

12. How helpful have electronic sources been in helping you to locate secondary sources? 
 Very Helpful  Sometimes helpful  Rarely helpful 
 I do not use electronic sources to locate secondary information. 

13. Some manuscripts and other primary source materials, such as images, have been digitized 
and are accessible online. 
 I use them frequently.  I sometimes use them. 
 I rarely use them.  I never use them. 

14. If you used the digitized version of a manuscript, would you still feel it necessary to look at 
the original in order to use it in your research? 
 Yes  No  Not sure 

15. Which Web sites do you most frequently use? 
16. How have you learned to use electronic sources? Please check all answers that apply. 
 I taught myself. 
 I learned from my colleagues. 
 I learned from a librarian. 
 I had some type of instruction from a class or workshop. 
 I learned from my children. 
 I learned from a database provider (e.g., EBSCO). 



 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

  

  
   
   

      

    
   

      

  
               

 424 College & Research Libraries	 September 2004 

 I learned from other individuals not listed in these choices. 
 I have not learned how to use electronic sources 
 I do not use electronic sources. 
 I would like more instruction in how to use electronic sources. 

17. What impact have electronic sources had on your research? 

Part D. Teaching. 
The following questions relate to your information practices as a teacher. 
1. 	 Please check all of the following responses that best describe your policy on student use of 

Web sites for class assignments. 
 I have no policy. 
 I do not consider Web sites appropriate sources of information for class assignments. 
 Student use of Web sites is encouraged. 
 Student use of Web sites is allowed, but only as a supplement to books and journals. 
 Students are allowed to use Web sites according to guidelines I have created. 

2. 	 Do you incorporate Web sites into your classroom instruction? 
 Yes  No 

3. 	 Which Web sites do you recommend to your students? 
4. 	 Which sources do your students use most for their wri en assignments? 
 Special collections or archival materials  Newspapers 
 Books  Journal articles  Audiovisual media 
 Maps  Government documents  Web sites 

Part E. Professional Information 
1. 	 The university or institution with which you are affiliated: 
2. 	 Number of years teaching at the post-secondary level. 
 1–5  6–10  11–15  16–20  21–25  26+ 

3. 	 Your rank. 
 Professor  Associate Professor  Assistant Professor  Instructor 
 Lecturer  Adjunct (any rank)  Other 

4. 	 Your area(s) of research. 
5. 	 Your age. 
 20–29  30–39  40–49  50–59  60–69  70+ 

6. 	 Your gender. 
 Female  Male 

7. 	 Would you be willing to be interviewed by telephone as a follow-up to this survey? 
If the answer is yes, please leave an e-mail, phone, or address below so that we may contact 
you if we need to. 

Thank you for taking the time to participate in this study. 



               

         

Historians and Their Information Sources 425 

APPENDIX B
	
Seven Open-ended Questions
	

1. Which of the following factors most frequently affect your choice of information 
sources: quality, availability, ease of use? Why? Are there times when one factors is 
more important than the others? 

2. How would you define “quality” in an information source? 

3. When searching for information on a topic in a bibliographic database such as 
WorldCat or Historical Abstracts or America, History and Life, which kind of search 
are you most likely to do, a subject heading search or a keyword search? 

4. If you come up with 100 titles from a subject search in WorldCat or a bibliographic 
database such as Historical Abstracts or America, History and Life, on what basis do 
you distinguish which ones you will try to obtain and which ones aren’t as promis-
ing? 

5. Please describe any problems you have experienced with bibliographic databases 
such as WorldCat or Historical Abstracts or America, History and Life. 

6. Can you recall any instance when you avoided or consciously chose not to seek 
information from a source (person, library, index, bibliography, Internet, etc.) even if 
you believed that information relevant to your research might be available from that 
source? Please describe the situation. 

7. If serendipity or browsing is a part of your research process, could you give an 
example in which it played an important role?