Assessment of Scholarly Needs for the Use of Digital Time-Based Media

Abstract

One of the major motivations for the Avalon Media System project has been to support the needs of humanities researchers for access to and use of time-based media from library and archival collections. One specific goal of Avalon’s Mellon Foundation grant has been to assess scholarly needs through user research at using a multi-method approach, primarily ethnographic in character. The focus of this user research was to uncover issues users have trying to use streaming media within their research projects and to look at the technology they employ and how it helps and/or hinder their research processes, leading to recommendations for improvements to both Avalon and to the broader array of audiovisual access software aimed at researcher use. This report outlines the literature review, study methodology, results, recommendations, and conclusions from this assessment of scholarly needs.