Information management in the humanities: Scholarly processes, tools, and the construction of personal collections

The promise and challenge of information management in the humanities has garnered a great deal of attention and interest (University of Minnesota Libraries, 2006; Freiman et al., 2010; Bulger et al., 2011; Wilson & Patrick, 2011; Trace & Karadkar, 2013). Research libraries and archives, as well as groups from within the humanities disciplines themselves, are being tasked with providing robust support for information management practices, including helping to engage humanities scholars with appropriate digital technologies in ways that are sensitive to disciplinary-based cultures and practices. However, significant barriers impede this work, primarily because the infrastructure (services, tools, and collaborative networks) to support scholarly information management is still under development. Under the aegis of the Scholars Tracking Archival Resources (STAR) project we are studying how humanities scholars gather and manage primary source materials with a goal of developing software to support their information management practices. This article reports the findings from our interviews with twentysix humanities scholars, in conjunction with a set of initial requirements for a mobile application that will support scholars in capturing documents, recreating the archival context, and uploading these documents to cloud storage for access and sharing from other devices.