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Defining user requirements for Holocaust research infrastructures and services in the EHRI project
Stavros Angelis1 , Agiatis Benardou1 , Panos Constantopoulos1,2 & Costis Dallas1,3,4
{s.angelis@dcu.gr, a.benardou@dcu.gr, p.constantopoulos@dcu.gr, c.dallas@dcu.gr}
1 Digital

Curation Unit IMIS, Athena Research Centre, Athens, Greece 2 Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece 3 Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University, Athens, Greece 4 Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada

1. EHRI: The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project (www.ehri-project.eu) (2010-2014)

Collaborative European project co-funded by the ESFRI e-Infrastructures programme Aimed at supporting the European Holocaust research community by establishing unified online access to dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust all over Europe and Israel, and by encouraging collaborative research through the development of tools Following the important work done by many organizations throughout Europe and Israel in collecting and saving documents, objects, photos, film and art related to the Holocaust, EHRI will enable bringing Holocaust archives together and taking the research into this area several steps further Design and implementation of a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) offering online access to a wide variety of dispersed Holocaust archives and to a number of tools to work with them.

3. Interview and questionnaire research: key questions

These key questions, emerging from Holocaust scholar interviews, correspond to entities defined in the scholarly activity model which was developed by DCU in the Preparing DARIAH: Digital Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities project (http://www.dariah.eu).

Research Activity
How do researchers seek, find and organize unpublished materials? How does this activity differ in various stages of their research? What is the relative importance of textual, vs. non-textual resources, and what the effect of genre and format on their use? How do researchers use scholarly literature for a research project? How do researchers deal with resources in languages they do not know? How do researchers organize the information? Do they keep databases? How do researchers keep notes? How do they organize them? Do researchers collaborate with their colleagues? At what stage in their research? Do they co-author?

Research Goal, Concept & Proposition

What is the research goal, and topic of research? How does it relate to the Holocaust? Which theories, ideas or concepts are involved?

2. Research methodology and plan

Context of discovery
Literature review Semi-open interviews with Holocaust researchers DARIAH results Themes Questions Initial Hypotheses Online questionnaire on user requirements

Place
Where do researchers prefer to work? How is working in a archive different to working in a library, their office or home?

Context of confirmation

Format & Resource Type

Which published and/or unpublished resources do researchers use? What types, genres and formats of resources? What kinds of information system(s) do researchers use?

Descriptive statistics User profiles Hypotheses testing

Discussion Interpretation Conclusions

User requirement s

Tool/Service & Procedure

What online tools do researchers use and for what purpose? Which ones are more useful? Which ones are not? At which stages of their research do they use particular tools?

Ca. 15 Interviewees

Ca. 300 Respondees

4. Questionnaire survey and preliminary results

A. Scope note on sampling approach The questionnaire was distributed online, and respondents were approached through online communities and for a Therefore, results may reflect more the attitudes and views of innovators and early adopters than the overall population of Holocaust researchers B. Respondent profile 77.1% of the respondents live in the EU. Most common countries are Germany (22.4%), Holland (17.1%), United States (15.1%), United Kingdom (5.9%), Hungary (4.6%), Greece (3.9%), Romania (3.9%), Sweden (2.6%), Austria (2%) and Israel (2%). About half of the respondents are established researchers attached to a university (30.5%), research centre (11.5%) or freelance (13.2%). 18.4% are PhD candidates or postgraduate students, 7.2% are amateur researchers and 5.3% work in museums. 49% of the respondents describe their archival research skills as expert, and 43.7% as intermediate. History is the predominant field (90.1%). Fields represented by more than 10% of respondents (often in conjunction with history) include: languages and literature, cultural studies, Hebrew/Jewish studies, political science and international relations.

Research lifecycle process Preliminary results

Information seeking Unpublished textual sources are accessed more often in analogue, but also commonly in digital form. On the other hand, video and sound recordings are more often accessed digitally. Published resources are accessed both in digital, and somewhat less frequently, in analogue form, with the exception of books, accessed in printed form by 99.1% and digitally by 61.2% of respondents. 70.8% of respondents rate as very important looking at footnotes in articles/books, 67.5% searching using specific query terms, and 63% using collection summaries, inventories or other other finding aids. Asking colleagues for advice is considered very important by 45% and, equally, asking archivists by 44.8% of respondents. Finding research resources by chance is considered very important only by 29.9% of respondents. Entry points rated as very important include named entities such as person names (77.4%), dates (65.2%), places (61.9%) and events (61.9%). Provenance (57.4%), event type (47.1%), holding institution (45.2%) and genre (40.6%) are also popular. Four out of five respondents use unpublished sources in languages other than their own (79.9%). 64.9% of respondents consider filing together digital copies of unpublished resources very important. A majority still considers keeping paper lists of references (61%) and photocopies (57.1%) very important. Few consider very important the use of catalogue cards (5.8%) and manual keyword indexes (14.9%), yet only 34.4% consider using a software application to manage interesting resources very important. 72.1% consider downloading digital copies of published materials relevant to their research very important, as against 55.8% copying and printing physical copies. Only 26.6% consider using a bibliographic reference management application very important vis-a-vis 64% collecting references in a word processing or paper document. More than half consider annotation very important: highlighting text passages (55.8%), storing them together with their own notes (55.8%), as marginalia (51.3%) or as part of their research draft (50.6%). Quickly scanning text is rated as very important by 54.2% of respondents, while end-to-end reading only by 42.6%. 50% of the researchers ask colleagues for their opinion at initial stages of research. 19.5% think that sharing their own notes on specific resources with colleagues is not at all important. 46.1% regard copyright or privacy issues as important obstacles for their research. 47.4% find resources in a physical archive or collection as trustworthy as those in a digital archive 58.4% find paper finding aids as trustworthy as online finding aids.

Language use Resource organization

Study and annotation

Questionnaire survey factsheet Available online: http://www.surveymonkey. net/EHRI-researchers Dates: August 17th, 2011 to February 3rd, 2012 Responses to date: 223 Sampling method: purposive, to match EHRI user target population

Collaboration Normative views

Information technology use and place of work Many report using online document storage, virtual community, or translation services, such a Google+ (54.9%), Google Docs (48.9%), Google Translate (38.3%), Dropbox (25.6%), Facebook (21.1%), academia.edu (18%) and LinkedIn (15%). 92.1% regularly use their own personal computer for research; 76.1% work regularly at home, 52.9% in a library and 46.5% in an archive. Strikingly, 24.3% already report using a digital tablet or other portable device for research purposes. More than 80% use computers to find and organize resources, to keep notes and communicate outcomes. 52% use a speadsheet for data management.