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Abstract

The Getty art history information program carried out a two-year project to study how humanities scholars operate as end users of online databases. Visiting scholars at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, were offered the opportunity to so unlimited subsidized searching of DIALOG databases. This first report from the project analyzes the vocabulary terms twenty-two scholars used in their natural language descriptions of their information needs and in their online searches. The data were extracted from 165 natural language statements and 1.068 search terms. Vocabulary categories used by humanities scholars were found to differ markedly from those used in the sciences, a fact that imposes distinctive demands on thesaurus development and the design of online information systems. Humanities scholars searched for far more named individuals, geographical terms, chronological terms, and discipline terms than was the case in a comparative science sample. The analysis provides substantial support for the growing perception that information needs of humanities scholars are distinct from those of scholars in other fields, and that the design of information-providing systems for these scholars must take their unique qualitites into account