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

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postdoctoral students, who were also us<strong>in</strong>g resources that had been recommended but were uncerta<strong>in</strong>
about where the best recommendations would come from and were far more skeptical about the quality
of resources that they discovered outside of library catalogs and f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>g aids. 587 One behavior reported
by both groups of students was a general unwill<strong>in</strong>gness to cite digital material 588 that they had used:
Both groups were unlikely to cite the digital material if there was a paper or analogue citation
available, although for different reasons. The undergraduates were concerned that they would
be perceived as hav<strong>in</strong>g not completed ‘proper’ research unless they cited the analogue
resources, whereas the postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers were” more concerned about
giv<strong>in</strong>g stable citations that future researchers would be able to trace (Meyer et al. 2009).
The other major reasons students gave for not us<strong>in</strong>g digital resources were a lack of trustworth<strong>in</strong>ess <strong>in</strong>
the material, the uncerta<strong>in</strong> persistence of a digital resource, other general vett<strong>in</strong>g concerns, and many
students stressed the importance of brand<strong>in</strong>g by trusted <strong>in</strong>stitutions to promote use of a digital resource.
The concern for need<strong>in</strong>g stable citations to electronic resources was also illustrated by Bodard (2008)
<strong>in</strong> his discussion of the creation of the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias website.
To better determ<strong>in</strong>e the actual impact and use of a digital resource, Meyer et al. had a number of
suggestions. To beg<strong>in</strong> with, they argued that digital projects should measure impact from the beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g
of the project, ideally before the website has even been designed. While they believed that impact
should be measured regularly, they also advised that projects should not get “bogged down” by
plann<strong>in</strong>g overly detailed studies. In addition, they proposed that susta<strong>in</strong>ability strategies should be built
<strong>in</strong> from the beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g. They also recommended that projects should make efforts to secure follow-up
fund<strong>in</strong>g to measure impact and actively promote their projects through blogs, publications, conference
reports, etc., as well as make sure that they are <strong>in</strong>cluded <strong>in</strong> trusted gateways (such as library
<strong>in</strong>formation portals). In the long run, <strong>in</strong> terms of measur<strong>in</strong>g impact, they urged that all projects
consider multiple sources of evidence, exam<strong>in</strong>e them from different perspectives, and use a variety of
metrics. On a practical note, they po<strong>in</strong>ted out that projects that do not ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> stable and easy-to-cite
URLs make it difficult for scholars to reference them <strong>in</strong> their publications. Lastly, they recommended
reach<strong>in</strong>g out to the next generation of scholars. “There are important generational shifts tak<strong>in</strong>g place:
younger researchers are develop<strong>in</strong>g research habits that will become ma<strong>in</strong>stream as they replace their
elders.” Meyer et al concluded, while also emphasiz<strong>in</strong>g that “these so-called digital natives are a
natural constituency for digital collections, so ensure that your resources are available to them, usable
by them, and promoted to them” (Meyer et al. 2009).
587 This behavior is <strong>in</strong> contrast to that of the digital humanist researchers observed <strong>in</strong> Toms and O’Brien, who relied largely on Google or other search
eng<strong>in</strong>es to f<strong>in</strong>d resources of <strong>in</strong>terest, but supports the f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs of (Warwick et al. 2008a) and (Brown and Greengrass 2010) that academics and students
valued resource-discovery tools that helped them identify reliable digital resources. In contrast, a recent survey of more than 3,000 faculty by the Ithaka
group <strong>in</strong>dicated that faculty were <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly us<strong>in</strong>g discovery tools other than “library specific start<strong>in</strong>g po<strong>in</strong>ts,” and that only 30 percent of humanities
faculty still started their search for digital materials us<strong>in</strong>g a library discovery tool (Schonfeld and Housewright 2010).
588 Similar citation behavior was reported by Sukovic (2009) where literary scholars and historians were often unwill<strong>in</strong>g to cite digital resources (and thus
often cited the analog source even when they had only used the digital version) for various reasons, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g fear that their colleagues did not approve of
us<strong>in</strong>g such resources and that the referenc<strong>in</strong>g of digital resources did not fit with<strong>in</strong> the academic practice of their discipl<strong>in</strong>e. She concluded “the
multifarious nature of scholars’ use of e-texts, revealed <strong>in</strong> the study, was not reflected <strong>in</strong> citation practices.”