A Study of the Archival Information Needs and Use Behavior of Historians

This study attempts to investigate the information needs and use behavior of historians in archives. The questionnaires and depth interview methods are pursued for a systematic investigation and realization of opinions from the faculty of history school. Interviews are taken for analyzing the information needs of historians and the difficulties of access archival collection. The results are summarized as follows: (1) The gateways of historians to access research information are library databases, catalogs and archival finding aids. (2) The material types of often use by historians are monograph, periodical and archives. (3) The strategy to find relevant archives is to search by specific person name or designated event name. (4) Browsing the architecture of categories and fonds are helpful to realize the overview of research topics. (5) The difficulties of using archives are the unfriendly retrieval system, digitization quality, integrity of the content, unclarity of classification and description, and the access restrictions. Finally, the suggestions of archival collection development and public service policies are proposed to be reference.