Researchers need archives ... but have problems finding them

A report published last month highlights the difficulties encountered by researchers in the humanities and social sciences when it comes to finding archival materials for use in their work.

Archival research, increasingly important among scholars across disciplines, is particularly challenging due to the idiosyncratic organization of archives and the range and variety of materials housed within them. Many archives—foreign or domestic, public or private—do not represent their holdings in online catalogs, or do not conform to standards that allow easy discovery and access. Further, archival holdings are not represented in traditional databases and indexes.

The report is called "A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Academic Support" and is available in PDF form from the University of Minnesota. A research team based in the university library was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to investigate researchers' requirements in terms of resources and infrastructure and to see how the library could help them. One of the four top priority needs identified by the research team was:

Archival research information and tools to assist scholars in finding appropriate archival collections and learning more about accessing them.

The report proposes the establishment of a 'Scholar's Collective' at Minnesota to help humanities and social science researchers to share expertise and information. There isn't much mention of how the difficulties surrounding access to archival information might be resolved, however... This report was referred to in a talk given by Lorcan Dempsey on 3 July at Edinburgh University Library, on "The digital library landscape and trends in the world of Web 2.0". There's a webcast available on the Edinburgh site. Lorcan also mentioned the report in his blog.