Preserving for People: Observing Humanities Scholars’ Research Practices in a Hybrid Archive Environment

In order to assess the potential suitability of digital preservation efforts for future research, it is necessary to understand how users interact with information in the present. Yet there is very little information on how humanities researchers – a key user group for archives – interact with archives beyond discovery. In the following, we show the importance of recognising end-users as part of wider information workflows that comprise not only discovery but the reuse of information and an unfolding interpretation of materials to construct new knowledge. We make our case through the presentation of findings from a naturalistic empirical observation of 11 humanities researchers engaging in research at a national archive. Our work identifies two research practices important to knowledge construction – reading and collecting –through which scholars create an interpretation of the archival record situated in its wider context