ABSTRACT
One of the major challenges for user studies in the digital age is connecting with online users. We are able to wield a range of quantitative methods which provide us with insights into what users do online but, as I argued in Chapter 3, these findings are at their most useful when combined with qualitative insights from users themselves. Libraries and archives have invested heavily in large-scale digitisation, and with good reason: there is no doubt about the demand for access to digitised materials online. What we have often lacked is an understanding of why users are so eager for digitised materials. Chapter 4 noted that libraries are becoming proactive in engaging with users in order to better shape collections to meet their needs. User studies have an important role in this respect: by undertaking empirically driven research into how large-scale digitised collections have been received and used, we can better understand how to develop them in the future to avoid creating barriers to reuse. To date, large-scale digitisation has often come at the expense of universal access, as the realities of contemporary social and political structures work to shape and constrain the impact of digitised collections. This chapter explores two of the key impacts of mass digitisation on users. First, I will argue that LSDC have been positive for users. Drawing on survey data and a citation analysis of British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers, I will argue that users benefit immensely from online access to resources. They are extremely positive about this impact, and this positivity is reflected in a growing number of citations for key resources. However, there is less certainty over how these benefits are truly transformative. It is certainly the case that remote access to digitised collections is, in itself, a hugely beneficial development for users. But there is no clear sense of how this has actually changed what users are doing. I will argue that, other than a few innovative projects, which use digitised newspapers in ways which are uniquely facilitated by the media specificity of computers, the majority of users are really engaged in accelerated versions of their existing research behaviours. In the second section, I will present findings from a web log analysis of Welsh Newspapers Online. This will show that users are still deeply engaged with collections online, often
spending significant periods of time on a resource, but that their behaviour does indeed more closely resemble what we would expect from a networked web interface rather than a physical archive. In doing so, I will reflect on the theoretical shift from “reader” to “user” that has been proposed by Brake (2012). Although there is evidence that this abstraction has indeed occurred, I will argue that, in fact, it represents a logical reaction on the part of users to the problem of information overload. Users are provided with huge quantities of digitised content and very specific web interfaces, which support a limited range of interactions, and the behaviour they exhibit reflects this fact. If there is genuine concern about the negative impacts of digital media upon users, then the imperative is not to build a case for the intellectual diminishment of these users. We must instead address the inadequacies of the interfaces which foster this kind of behaviour. Interface design plays a key role in confining users to specific types of interaction, and we must therefore address ways in which better interfaces can be created which allow users to transcend the current dominance of the search paradigm in library digitised collections.
