Artefactual literacy-related abilities for historians’ effective seeking and use of primary resources

Abstract

This study explored historians’ archival search behaviour from Yakel and Torres’ User Expertise in Archives (UEA) model. The model contained three types of knowledge that influence archival researchers’ information seeking: domain knowledge, artefactual literacy, and archival intelligence. This paper reported on the artefactual literacy-related abilities and behaviour. A naturalistic inquiry approach was adopted to study twelve history master’s students’ thesis research behaviour. In-depth interviewing was used to collect narratives of archival search experiences. The inductive constant comparisons and open/axial coding were used in the analysis. Artefactual literacy related abilities and behaviour were categorized into external criticism-related and internal criticism-related. The former included three abilities: understanding the production context of primary sources, the ability to differentiate between intentional and unintentional sources, and the ability to cope with language limitations. The latter included two abilities: putting oneself in the shoe of the historical figure understudy, and comparing documents with different perspectives. UEA is a powerful analytic model for studying archive users’ information behaviour. Archivists should care about how domain knowledge and artefactual literacy influenced archival search decisions and actions.