This exploratory and qualitative study examined the appraisal practices of archivists in university special collections, including how archivists define appraisal, decide what to keep and discard, apply a collection policy in their decision process, and contend with problematic aspects of the practice. The first part of this study examined the…

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of academic digital archives on scholarship and university status. Digital archives have played roles in strengthening scholarly research and developing innovative fields of study. This is especially prevalent in the rise of digital humanities and making work available through digital libraries and…

This study examines the research and scholarship sharing and dissemination practices in an online environment among law school faculty. Guided by one of the most widely used technology usage and adoption models, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), it investigates law school professors' attitudes and perceptions toward…

This dissertation compares and contrasts the founding and early manuscript collecting activities of four publicly accessible American archival repositories known for their extensive holdings in business, industrial, and technological history: the Baker Library at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts; the Hagley Library and Museum in…

Institutional repositories have been introduced as an innovative and alternative technology for scholarly communication and have received considerable attention from scholars across disciplines and around the globe. While some universities in Thailand have developed and implemented institutional repositories for nearly a decade, knowledge of the…

The purpose of this dissertation is to illuminate the missing voices of historically black college and university dance programs in the national discussion on the history and development of dance in American higher education. The methodology included the selection of five subject schools that are historically black colleges and universities…

The purpose of this study was to explore the construction of a collaborative Baptist digital library and archive on the Internet. The study investigated how a central electronic location of digitized Baptist primary source materials could look and work on the Internet and how such a project could benefit Baptist history professors, the primary…

This study used archival data to explore the impact of the rural village library and other factors on the academic achievement of secondary school students in the Ugandan village of Kitengesa, and related these findings to rural library development currently taking place in Uganda and other African countries such as Burkina Faso and Ghana. A…

This research explores individuals' relationships with their personal digital information through the concepts of digital possessions and self extension. Two studies were conducted. In the first study, twenty-three participants were interviewed about their definitions of digital possessions and digital legacies, and about their connections to…

This study is a comparison of the descriptive tagging practices among library, archive, and museum professionals using an inter-indexing consistency approach. The first purpose of this study was to determine the extent of the similarities and differences among professional groups when assigning descriptive tags to a wide variety of objects that…

In 1999, it was necessary to build an interface for the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive (the world's largest digital video archive at the time) that constituted over 120,000 hours of video of over 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors, rescuers and witnesses. In order to build this educational research interface, an…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

This qualitative study examined the development of the partnership between the American Library Association (ALA) and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). The research focused on archival documents from the ALA Archives at the University of Illinois Archives. The archival research focused on documents during the…