We built it. But are they coming? This question is on the minds of the many faculty and staff in higher education who have developed collections of digital resources and objects but are unsure of how - or even if - they are being used. A new research project that we are undertaking at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education hopes to provide at least a partial answer.

Attention Humanities and Social Science Instructors: We need your input!

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundations, the study will attempt to find out if anyone in the humanities and social sciences is using digital collections in undergraduate teaching and if so, how? If not, why not?

To date there has not been a systematic analysis of existing robust user studies of digital collections. Nor has there been a discussion among digital collection developers and researchers about the utility of a set of guidelines that could be applied across collections. A number of studies have explored the scholarly use of digital "library" collections, yet few have attempted to focus on the use of unrestricted digital collections that may reside outside of libraries. The variety of digital collections beyond the library universe is extensive. Unrestricted collections range from ambitious institutional attempts to put up course web pages (e.g., MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative), to aggregations of course materials and learning objects (e.g., World Lecture Hall , Connexions , MERLOT ). Countless other collections are created and maintained by individual scholars.

In the wake of the dot.com bust and the implosion of a large number of "virtual university" efforts, members of the higher education community have a renewed interest in exploring how high quality digital knowledge can be made available to the world at no or minimal cost, and with great effectiveness. The University of California, as well as other research universities and governmental agencies both in the US and abroad, with help from private and government sources, has been investing significantly in creating digital collections. Many make this intellectual and cultural capital freely available to faculty, students, and in the case of UC, to the general public. Given the large number of digitized collections that are currently available, many public and private funders of these efforts are now concerned about the perceived low level of use of digital resources among the teaching faculty of our institutions.

This research project, a result of extensive discussions with the Mellon and Hewlett Foundations about salient policy questions related to collection use and sustainability, will analyze the use of open source, unrestricted digital collections in humanities and social science courses. The main thrust of the project will include an analysis of the types of digital collections that currently exist, and extended conversations with faculty and graduate students about their use or non-use of digital collections in humanities and social science undergraduate courses. We will conduct extensive focus groups, interviews, and surveys with faculty across a wide range of institutions including UC and California community colleges.

The questions we will be exploring encompass three broad policy areas: strategic planning and investments, the special needs of the humanities and social sciences, and the identification of effective and efficient methods for understanding use across a variety of collections.

Strategic Planning and Investments

We know nothing about whether the investments in production and distribution of "free" collections are warranted by market demand relative to undergraduate teaching (and/or other) contexts. Are the costs of creating, preserving and disseminating digital collections warranted by the level of their use in undergraduate teaching?

The question of cost for creation and maintenance of digital collections is not trivial, especially in an era of shrinking institutional budgets and deflated expectations of consumer markets for digital curricular materials. And we know very little about how unrestricted digital collections, such as those produced at research universities, are being used by the different tiers of higher education institutions. There is an implicit assumption that faculty at a variety of institutions import digital knowledge to enhance their undergraduate teaching. It is unknown, however, if such importation occurs on a measurable scale. And if not, why not? This is of particular importance in California where there is a presumption that digital assets will flow from the UC research university system to institutions with fewer resources, such as community colleges.

We will use a variety of methods to analyze how, how much, and even if unrestricted digital collections are being used in targeted humanities and social science teaching and learning contexts, including UC, community colleges, and liberal arts colleges.

Focus on Humanities and Social Sciences

The challenges of integrating digital collections into humanities and social science teaching environments are not well understood. Do these broad disciplinary areas have special needs when it comes to technology in the classroom?

There are quite a few good models for integrating online materials in science and technical courses such as Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and Computer Science (see, for example, the Pew Course Redesigns and the Mellon CEUTT projects). Technical solutions to undergraduate teaching in the humanities and social sciences, however, have been more elusive and less robustly funded. In fact, many have argued that technical and professional courses, where there is a heavier reliance on codified knowledge, may be more amenable to technological interventions. The nature of non-science/non-technical disciplines themselves presents a formidable challenge. Every faculty member has precise and personal ideas about how he/she teaches a course and what kinds of primary source materials are useful; not every faculty member will teach US History, Chinese Literature, or Foreign Policy in quite the same way or use the same primary source material.

Our own experience and recent discussions with faculty suggest that successful integration of technology may be stymied in courses that rely heavily on primary source material and significant verbal and written interaction. We have identified a number of factors that might prevent routine integration of rich digital archives in the classroom. They include constraints on faculty time, lack of appropriate support structures, and difficulties with finding, analyzing, and customizing the abundance of online material available, including the use of faculty personal collections.

We will conduct focus groups, interviews, and surveys with faculty in a range of disciplines including history, literature, geography, anthropology, political science, and visual arts and architecture to get a deeper understanding of user and non-user behavior. We will be analyzing what combination of factors might predict successful integration of digital collections into undergraduate teaching.

Consolidation of Effective Strategies for Understanding Use

Can the digital collection community devise and disseminate a set of user assessment methods that are effective across a wide range of digital collections and undergraduate education contexts?

The lack of a uniform approach to understanding use across the many types of digital collections, especially those of the unrestricted type, is due in large part to: 1) the relatively recent availability of multiple, well-developed collections, 2) the great diversity of collection types that has emerged, 3) the significant costs of well-designed evaluation research, and 4) the dynamic and evolving nature of the collections themselves. The result is a relative patchwork of excellent studies that are either illustrative of specific projects or reflect broad surveys of librarians and library users. There is, however, no uniform approach that can be gleaned from these studies.

We will be conducting a systematic analysis of existing robust studies, and convene a discussion among digital collection developers and researchers to develop a set of guidelines for understanding the level and quality of use that could be useful across collections.

Our partners are the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society ( CITRIS ), University of California, Berkeley; and the California Digital Library ( CDL ), University of California, Office of the President.

Please visit our project website . It will be growing as research findings and relevant background materials are added.