Masters Thesis: 'The use if Electronic Resources by Historians:
A Comparison between Departments at selected Scottish Universities.' Jane H Smith
2002. Robert Gordon University: Aberdeen
Electronic resources are increasingly used throughout academia as
alternatives to paper-based resources. Several studies have investigated
the usage of electronic resources (e-resources), across various disciplines.
Using a questionnaire and several interviews, this study investigated how
and to what extent do staff and student historians use selected e-resources,
what training they have received and whether their age, gender and IT level
had any affect on their use of e-resources.The behaviour of historians appear
to differ little from staff and students within other disciplines at university
level, especially with their usage of e-journals and search engines and use the
Internet to a greater extent than CD-ROMs. Overall there appears to be greater use of
Internet-based databases by historians than in other disciplines. Historians use
of paper-based resources to a high extent. No difference between the historians’
gender and their usage of resources was observed, apart from their usage of
reference works and databases on CD-ROMs, where male historians made more use of
databases and females of reference works. The training offered was rated as being
generally of a good standard, although less CD-ROM training was offered to and
attended by historians than Internet training. The historians’ gender and IT level
appears to effect how they deal with documents found on both CD-ROMs and the
Internet. Few historians save documents to disk from CD-ROMs or the Internet.
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