Volume 42, Issue 2

Digital archives have been used extensively in historical research. While many user studies regarding digital collections have focused on their users and information behaviors, there is not much research on how digital archives have contributed to historical scholarship and why historians use them. Understanding which digital collections are useful for topical coverage in historical studies will provide important information in the development and assessment of digital preservation projects. This study examines the topical coverage of historical articles that cite digital archival collections, and also the content of digital archival collections that appear in these articles. By mapping the contents of the articles and digital archival collections, this study aims to understand historians’ use context for their historical research and to relate the association of digital projects to the scholarship of history

Best-practices guidelines reflecting the consensus of experienced professionals are invaluable for archives with enough resources to implement them. For many archives, however, such guidelines may fail to meet on-the-ground needs and may set the bar too high. Some organizations respond by ignoring the guidelines entirely, failing to realize that short of best practices, they still have responsible and creditable options. The preservation operations of many archives will benefit from an established set of minimum standards that must be met, as well as best practices to which to aspire. (See for example Bamberger and Brylawski 2010, 68).