Scholars’ Searching for Audio-Visual Information in Archives

Abstract

This paper contributes insights into scholars’ information searching in audio-visual archives, more specifically in relation to postcolonial research projects. The paper introduces the concept of information needs based on the framework by Ingwersen. Further, the paper addresses the scholars’ search strategies and the search challenges they experienced. Insights are obtained via in-depth interviews with six scholars. The scholars adapt collection-specific search strategies and make extensive use of keyword searching. The study demonstrates the complexity of searching archives for information and how demanding searching is with respect to requiring domain knowledge, artefactual literacy, and archival intelligence. Finally, the importance of access to the expertise of archivists is confirmed.