History Module

     I will absolutely be modeling any future LibGuides I create after the ones found at Temple University's library webpage. The depth and care taken for annotating each resource specifically for that guide is very different than others I have seen (where there is one annotation that appears in every guide that a resource appears in). David C. Murray's guide http://guides.temple.edu/content.php?pid=1264&sid=15632 for history is up to par with what I have seen from Temple. He includes three separate pages for Primary Sources for the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and demos for finding articles. There are several well though out sections, including one that contains resources for finding theses and dissertations specifically in the area of history. He also includes links to other guides to specific courses. For the class Hollywood and American History, Murray includes resources for film and popular culture in addition to more typical history resources. This is a great example of making sure to provide relevant instruction; it is good to appeal universally, but it is also good to appeal specifically. Contextualize your information to your target audience. Historians, especially, might approach differently from other students and faculty, and so explaining how each resource is relevant to them is an important part of the process.

     Something I had never considered when thinking of different subject areas of study are how diverse different researchers needs and interest could be in one discipline. There are a large number of nursing and public health students who frequently contact the reference desk for help. Between the two groups, they primarily use PubMed, CINAHL, and Medline. Dalton and Charnigo's study finds that of a wide variety of history electronic databases, only four are used by more than 10% of the study population. Perhaps both because history is such a spread out discipline, over time and place, and the nature of historical resources, in that digitizing them is expensive and time consuming, it is difficult to present these resources in universally appealing databases. Historical societies, archives, and museums take on a much larger role in historical research, I think, than in other disciplines, and maybe for similar reasons are the sources used by historians more varied.

          It is interesting to me how wide reaching historians' study can be. The Royal Society's library is a portal to the history of science and medicine. Most college freshman would probably not include the study of medicine and science in their description of history. I probably would not have either! But anybody is likely to be a historian on something. And any museum or collection is preserving some history. It is just up to people themselves to make these connections and discover new meanings from the record we have preserved.

     The list of history resources offered by the Digital Librarian reminds me of the Internet Scout, a weekly compilation of multidisciplinary resources organized by the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I think that the list has some great resources but there also dead links. There is no organization either! We are left to scroll the extremely large page to find what we are looking for. The Internet Scout similarly compiles links to interesting websites; many of which are digital libraries themselves or digitized collections. The links can be viewed by week published going back into the 1990s (yikes!) or they can be searched or browsed by subject . I check it weekly as the distractions it provides might end up being useful to a patron some day. Equally interesting are the free software posts that usually appear (though not this week).

    Looking through Kent's LibGuide, I'm actually surprised that I don't get more questions about these resources. I do not know if it is because people generally know how to use them, but anytime I get questions about research related to history, the patrons usually seem to be more interested in books (as reported by Dalton and Charnigo). I do not believe I have ever fielded a question by a history faculty member (of which 2% in the study said they consult librarians for help). A resource I have enjoyed in my own time is Chronicling America, which I'm assuming was down throughout the shutdown. It is weird to think how this discipline's access to information can be regulated by government; if the government controls access to the past through its archives, it can, if it wishes, withhold information which will change historians' understanding of the past (and present).