Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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<strong>in</strong>formation sources were largely preferred over specialist research sources, they stated that fund<strong>in</strong>g
might most usefully be given to projects that create large collections of <strong>in</strong>formation resources for
reference. As humanities scholars, they demanded content and <strong>in</strong>terfaces of the highest-possible
quality (whether a resource was commercial or free), and they suggested that the creators of specialist
digital resources spend more time on <strong>in</strong>terface design and user test<strong>in</strong>g of those designs. While their
f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs did illustrate that academics want both to easily f<strong>in</strong>d and use digital resources, they also
articulated that “the k<strong>in</strong>d of scholar who is likely to know they need such a resource and persist until
they f<strong>in</strong>d it is the k<strong>in</strong>d of early adopter who is already us<strong>in</strong>g specialist digital resources”(Warwick et al.
2008a). They thus concluded with a call for the producers of digital resources to focus on draw<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>
more traditional humanities users.
The RePAH Project
More focused research <strong>in</strong> terms of academic digital resource use has been conducted by the recently
concluded RePAH (Research Portals for the Arts and Humanities) project, which carried out a doma<strong>in</strong>wide
survey of how arts and humanities researchers might use an onl<strong>in</strong>e research portal <strong>in</strong> their work.
A recent article by Brown and Greengrass (2010) has presented an overview of the RePAH project’s
f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs. To set the context for RePAH, Brown and Greengrass outl<strong>in</strong>ed a brief history of e-humanities
research, fund<strong>in</strong>g, and <strong>in</strong>frastructure with<strong>in</strong> the United K<strong>in</strong>gdom over the past 10 years. Brown and
Greengrass stated that a major change <strong>in</strong> strategy had occurred, namely, that an orig<strong>in</strong>al emphasis on
<strong>in</strong>vest<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> access to resources had shifted to concerns about how these resources were used, and
f<strong>in</strong>ally to questions about the “skill levels and attitudes towards use of ICT <strong>in</strong> arts and humanities
research.” At the same time, the authors noted that the arts and humanities <strong>in</strong>volve a large number of
discipl<strong>in</strong>es with many different research traditions, and that “it can not be assumed that <strong>in</strong>novations <strong>in</strong>
one discipl<strong>in</strong>e necessarily meet the requirements of others” (Brown and Greengrass 2010).
A research portal, the authors expla<strong>in</strong>ed, focused on “federat<strong>in</strong>g distributed sites of <strong>in</strong>formation,” and
the RePAH project sought to explore how researchers across discipl<strong>in</strong>es might use such a tool. While
Warwick et al. (2008b) earlier reported that there had been no systematic exam<strong>in</strong>ations of the scholarly
use and nonuse of digital resources, Brown and Greengrass confirmed a similar lack of studies
<strong>in</strong>volv<strong>in</strong>g the general ICT use of arts and humanities scholars, as first noted by Toms and O’Brien:
Hitherto there has been no sector-wide comparative study to ascerta<strong>in</strong> how researchers are
us<strong>in</strong>g ICT and what they perceive their future needs to be. Consequently what is needed <strong>in</strong>
terms of an ICT <strong>in</strong>frastructure to support Arts and Humanities research is not well understood.
Are there, for example, significant differences <strong>in</strong> the ways <strong>in</strong> which researchers from different
discipl<strong>in</strong>es use ICT <strong>in</strong> their research Are some doma<strong>in</strong>s more technically advanced than
others How widespread is ICT based research across the sector Can a s<strong>in</strong>gle portal concept
meet the needs of the whole community (Brown and Greengrass 2010).
Such questions are often difficult to answer, Brown and Greengrass acknowledged, and the fact that
responsibility for fund<strong>in</strong>g this k<strong>in</strong>d of <strong>in</strong>frastructure is typically split across multiple agencies makes
cross-discipl<strong>in</strong>ary research even more problematic.
In an attempt to answer these questions, the RePAH project broadly def<strong>in</strong>ed their users as the “arts and
humanities research community” and specifically wanted to ascerta<strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>formation about these users
“<strong>in</strong>formation discovery strategies,” their Internet usage, their awareness and op<strong>in</strong>ions regard<strong>in</strong>g various
onl<strong>in</strong>e services such as repositories and portals, and their future expectations. They adopted a
multipronged approach that <strong>in</strong>cluded an onl<strong>in</strong>e questionnaire (with almost 150 respondents), focus