This new report from CLIR (the Council on Library and Information Resources) describes the Scholarly Work in the Humanities Project, a project initiated to discover how humanities scholars use digital and print resources available to them and to help libraries to develop print and digital collections to better serve scholars' needs. Thirty-three scholars participated, with interests ranging from nineteenth-century English poetry and painting, to ancient language translation, to madness in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century drama and culture, to early twentieth-century African-American poetry. In general, the study found that humanities scholars are no longer the technophobes they have been portrayed previously. Even more importantly, the study found a pattern of scholars sniffing out related information by following circuitous citation chains, tracking footnotes, and finding works that cite back to each other. An awareness of this pattern can help libraries select materials for digitization more intelligently. Carole Palmer, one of the investigators, says libraries' digitizing efforts have been trying to create a critical mass of digital materials and should instead try to create a "contextual mass."
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