Introduction. This study explored historians’ archival search behaviour from Yakel and Torres’ User Expertise in Archives (UEA) model. The model contained three types of knowledge that influence archival researchers’ information seeking: domain knowledge, artefactual literacy, and archival intelligence. This paper reported on the artefactual literacy-related abilities and behaviour. Method. A naturalistic inquiry approach was adopted to study twelve history master’s students’ thesis research behaviour. In-depth interviewing was used to collect narratives of archival search experiences. The inductive constant comparisons and open/axial coding were used in the analysis. Results. Artefactual literacy related abilities and behaviour were categorized into external criticism-related and internal criticism-related. The former included three abilities: understanding the production context of primary sources, the ability to differentiate between intentional and unintentional sources, and the ability to cope with language limitations. The latter included two abilities: putting oneself in the shoe of the historical figure understudy, and comparing documents with different perspectives. Conclusions. UEA is a powerful analytic model for studying archive users’ information behaviour. Archivists should care about how domain knowledge and artefactual literacy influenced archival search decisions and actions.
CITATION STYLE
Wang, Y. Y., & Lin, C. S. (2022). Artefactual literacy-related abilities for historians’ effective seeking and use of primary resources. In Information Research (Vol. 27). University of Boras. https://doi.org/10.47989/irisic2211
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