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 (Bulger et al., ; Freiman et al., ; Trace & Karadkar, ; University of Minnesota Libraries, ; Wilson & Patrick, ). 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, infrastructure (services, tools, and collaborative networks) to support scholarly information significant barriers impede this work, primarily because the 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 26 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.