Information Needs of Undergraduate Historians

Carolyn Keim

This project aims to investigate ways in which a major departmental library, the Seeley Library in the Faculty of History, can improve its support for its students' changing information needs.

While this project must be exploratory, given the paucity of information currently available on the habits of Cambridge undergraduate historians, it is intended to clarify the information needs of students in both Part I and Part II by analyzing their use of digital resources and contextualizing these results within the wider networks that support their search for information.

Undergraduate historians at Cambridge are required to evaluate and synthesize large amounts of material drawn from original sources and from the work of other historians.Mapping student strategies for reading and resource-gathering will enhance our understanding of students' information needs as well as current weaknesses within library provision. While this project will examine the increasing role digital resources have within the Faculty's broader teaching and learning remit, there will be a particular focus on the use (and usefulness) of digital primary sources. Using primary sources well is a key part of historical training and is a vital skill for success in Cambridge; moreover, as the Faculty stresses, contextualizing and interpreting such sources is also a valuable transferable skill. All successful undergraduate dissertations must draw on primary sources, and the compulsory Part II Special Subject papers are also centered around primary sources.

Previous research on the information skills of Cambridge undergraduates showed an overwhelming reliance on reading lists as the basic source of information, followed by lecturers' and supervisors' recommendations. This study will attempt to refine that information by studying how undergraduate historians use their reading lists (which often run to 50+ pages) and determining where students search for information when they undertake independent research. By understanding how students read, use online sources, and understand their reading list, the Seeley and other Cambridge libraries involved in the teaching of History will have a better map of the way forward in their resource provision and information-skills teaching.