engleski

Newspapers as Research Source: Information Needs and Information Seeking of Humanities Scholars

This paper focuses on newspapers as a scientific research source in the humanities. The purpose of this paper is to present a portion of the results obtained in the nationwide study which explored how Croatian humanities academics and scholars perceive and use (historical and current) newspapers. The study presented in this paper focused on two groups of researchers, historians and linguists, and aimed to answer the following research questions: ‘What kinds of information do (Croatian) historians and linguists look for in newspapers?’, ‘What difficulties do researchers encounter when using newspapers?’ and ‘What would enhance newspaper use in their further research?’. A survey was conducted in December 2013 through an online questionnaire, and the initial results show that almost half of the respondents use newspapers (print or online) as a primary research source and that the majority of respondents still prefer to consult print newspapers over electronic for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, although the majority of respondents find and consult the newspapers in local (Croatian) libraries, archives and museums, a significant portion of the respondents (20, 4%) visit foreign cultural heritage institutions to access the newspaper material they need. The paper critically analyses the information needs and behaviour of a specific newspaper user group which has not yet been studied in Croatia and provides data which can contribute to the development of national newspaper preservation policy.

newspapers; information behaviour; digital newspaper collections; scientific research; Croatia

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