World War 1 As Linked Open Data / quote 3 of 4
Problems historians encounter with digital collections
To better understand the problems humanities researchers encounter in utilizing these collections, re- searchers conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with CU faculty and students [11]. The major user needs identified were better support for: 1) locating documents and data relevant to a particular topic within distributed online collections; and 2) contextualizing the content, for instance, to gauge author bias or simply become familiar with the places, events, and people mentioned in the documents. In addition, problems were identified with documents being in unfamiliar languages, as well as with ambiguities and variations in names, such as place names changing over time or a person being referenced by different names in different documents.