A Start on Research Questions

Hello, I'm James. I'm in my last year in the LIS and ARM concentrations of the MI program, but as someone who is somewhat more interested in the practical aspects of the program, I have not put very much thought into specific research topics in these areas before entering this course.

Generally, the two things that have interested me most are more purely historical topics, or, going in the opposite direction, the ways in which technology has been changing how users interact with both archives and libraries. In particular, the way that potential users discover resources or even entire institutions is one thing which I would like to learn more about, and so that seems like a good starting point for Luker's exercise. That exercise left me with these questions.

-To what extent are the electronic collections of archives used by people without an academic background in a related area, and how does this compare to the use of print or other physical collections?

-What questions tend to lead users towards libraries and archives, or other similar institutions, rather than to resources like Wikipedia, which are immediately accessible but tend to be less authoritative?

-What role does the internet play in how users discover, and in the case of electronic collections, choose to access the materials available in different collections?

I haven't done any serious examination of the literature on any of these topics in the past, and so these questions remain very broad. There is quite likely an enormous amount of research attempting to answer these questions already, and looking through that would be a good next step in finding a good research question, as more focused questions for which there may not already be a good answer are likely as I learn more.