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Over the past decades, technological advancement and the mass digitization of information resources have led to the development of a range of digital resources for academic scholarship. Understanding the needs of scholars when employing digital resources for their work can lead to the building of digital infrastructure that not only enables access to the required information but also has the potential to transform scholarship through having a positive effect on the whole scholarly workflow. Through this article, we show how the design of digital libraries and resources can be improved to enhance information discovery and use in art history, while also benefiting other key areas of the research process. By employing an ethnographic approach to the study of scholarly practices, we developed a sound understanding of art historians' behaviour when interacting with information at different stages of the scholarly workflow. Our results show that scholars exhibited highly creative behaviour when conducting core scholarly activities, such as information seeking and use. Yet, the challenges they often encountered showed that there is still more work to be done to improve digital infrastructure and tools for scholarship in the field. Part of this article will focus on the user requirements for designing systems that facilitate discovery, encourage creative use of information, and trigger inspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of interfaces to long-lived digital humanities (DH) resources using an innovative combination of research methods from book history, interface design, and digital preservation and curation to investigate how interfaces to DH resources have changed over time. To do this, we used the Internet Archive's Wayback machine to investigate the original presentation and all subsequent changes to the interfaces of a small sample of projects. The study addresses the following questions: What can we learn from a study of interfaces to DH material? How have interfaces to DH materials changed over the course of their existence? Do these changes affect the way the resource is used, and the way it conveys meaning? Should we preserve interfaces for future scholarship? We show that a valuable information may be derived from the interfaces of long-lived projects. Visual design can communicate subtle messages about the way the resource was originally conceived by its creators and subsequent changes show how knowledge of user behaviour developed in the DH community. Interfaces provide information about the intellectual context of early digital projects. They can also provide information about the changing place of DH projects in local and national infrastructures, and the way that projects have sought to survive in challenging funding environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, public engagement is increasingly viewed as more than an 'additional extra' in academia. In the UK, it is becoming more common for research projects to embrace public engagement with the belief that it informs research, enhances teaching and learning, and increases research impact on society. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important to consider ways of incorporating public engagement activities into digital humanities research. This article discusses public engagement and digital humanities in practice, highlighting how museums are utilizing digital technology to engage the public. This article describes the development and presents the results of a case study: The QRator project, an application for digital interpretation in the museum and cultural heritage sector. The QRator project took an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to creating new ways for museum visitors to engage with museum objects and discussions. The objective was to understand how digital technologies, such as interactive labels and smartphones, create new ways for users to engage with museum objects; investigate the value and constraints of digital sources and methods involving cultural content; and demonstrate how crowdsourced digital interpretation may be utilized as a research source. This article will use the QRator project as a case study to explore how mobile devices and interactive digital labels can create new models for public engagement, visitor meaningmaking (Silverman, L. H. Visitor meaning-making in museums for a new age. Curator, 1995;38(3):161-70), and the construction of multiple interpretations inside museum spaces. This article will also put emphasis on how public engagement can and should be a core consideration of digital humanities projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]