Archive workers’ information needs and how their expert knowledge influences information searching and collection curation: an interview study

Introduction. The paper makes a call for research on archive workers, including archivists as archive users, and reports indicative findings of a study of archive workers’ information searching and curation of cultural heritage archives. The study is part of a European research project concerning user access to digital cultural heritage archives, from a post-colonial perspective. Method. We have conducted semi-structured interviews with five archive workers who work as scholars, as archive curators, and as mediators of archive content. All interviews were conducted in English, online, and were audio-recorded and transcribed. Analysis. The study explores three research questions: 1) what characterises the archive workers’ information needs?; 2) how does the archive workers’ expert knowledge influence their information searching?; and 3) how does the archive workers’ domain knowledge, in the form of post-colonial knowledge, influence the curation? The interview data are analysed by use of a qualitative thematic analysis method. Results. The archive workers’ information needs are characterised by topic, domain, and purpose. Further, the needs are work-related and illustrated by searching for their own research projects, intermediary searches on behalf of users, and searching as part of collection curation. They make use of numerous types of expert knowledge (collection knowledge, archival intelligence, artefactual literacy, and post-colonial domain knowledge) that influence their information searching and curation. Additionally, curation and information searching are affected by the quality of metadata, stemming from the colonizers’ perspective. Conclusions. This paper contributes novel insights about archive workers’ information seeking behaviour, their handling of different types of information needs, user mediation, and collection curation, based on post-colonial knowledge and hence supports the call for future research on this topic.