Digital Resource Study

About the Project

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How are digital resources being used in undergraduate teaching and learning in the humanities and social sciences?

Project Overview

The Center for Studies in Higher Education received grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to investigate the use of digital resources in humanities and social science undergraduate education. Additional funding was provided by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the Hewlett-Packard Company, the California Digital Library (CDL), and the Vice Chancellor of Research, UC Berkeley.

Our purpose was to map the universe of digital resources available to undergraduate educators in the humanities and social sciences (H/SS), and to examine how understanding use and users can benefit the integration of those resources into undergraduate teaching.

Our definition of digital resources was intentionally broad and included rich media objects (e.g., maps, video, images, etc), as well as text. These digital resources may reside in or outside of digital libraries, and include those developed by individual scholars as well as other entities.

Our methods includde discussion groups and surveys of faculty, graduate students, librarians, site owners and educational technology professionals. We also employed online surveys and transaction log analysis on select local collections. Specific activities are described in more detail below.

Rationale: Why Study Users?

Why study users? There are myriad reasons cited for undertaking and conducting user studies. They may range from product design and usability testing, to policing web sites, to facilitating policy and investment decisions. For our purposes there were three interrelated rationales for conducting the present research: (1) addressing questions of strategic planning and investments in digital resource provision and use, (2) identifying the special needs of the humanities and social sciences, particularly as they relate to the future of liberal education in a digital age, and (3) sharing effective strategies for understanding the array of uses and users across a wide variety of educational digital resource initiatives.

Activities:

Our specific approach emploedy multiple methods and empirical data to determine the outlines of how and if available digital resources are being used in undergraduate teaching environments. Activities included:

• Ongoing discussion among faculty, librarians, educational technology professionals, and collection/site owners across different higher education institutions.
• Creating a useful map of the range of digital resources available to and used by undergraduate educators.
• Consolidating, through a literature review, existing knowledge about use and users of digital resources in humanities/social science undergraduate teaching contexts.
• Surveying site owners about how and why they employ user studies.
• Sampling faculty opinion through a survey focused on what digital resources H/SS faculty actually use, how they use them in their teaching, and what barriers exist to their successful use of digital resources. Our target population for the survey was a random stratified sample of faculty at select University of California campuses, community colleges, and liberal arts colleges in California. We also surveyed faculty in other populations.
• Understanding the perspective of diverse users through analysis of survey and discussion group data along disciplinary, institutional, and other axes.
• Testing the efficacy and efficiency of methods of transaction log analysis and online surveys on select local collections.
• Convening collection owners, funders, and use researchers to facilitate the future coordination of comparative use data across a range of humanities/social science (H/SS) digital resources.

More detailed descriptions of some of these activities and our project findings can be found in the project Final Report.