ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way that art historians build their personal information collections as a means to identify and understand the specific behaviour and requirements they have in terms of tools and services in the digital age. It examines the way they gather, use and manage information in the context of their research and teaching projects. Unsworth introduced the concept of the scholarly primitives, arguing that there is some common, basic behaviour that can be identified across disciplines, especially in the Arts and Humanities. The chapter presents the results related to the information gathering and organization habits of art historians in an attempt to highlight some of the key issues some scholars face and suggest potential lines of action for facilitating the needs that occur. It then explores that the chosen framework for presenting the observations is based on Palmer's term of the activity of collecting which has two primitives: gathering and organizing.
