Fenlon, K., & Varvel, V. E. Jr. (2013, July). Local histories in global digital libraries: identifying demand and evaluating coverage. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 191–194). New York, NY: ACM.

Digital collections of primary source materials have potential to change how citizen historians and scholars research and engage with local history. The problem at the heart of this study is how to evaluate local history coverage, particularly among large-scale, distributed collections and aggregations. As part of an effort to holistically evaluate one such national aggregation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content (DCC), we conducted a national survey of reference service providers at academic and public libraries throughout the United States. In this paper, we report the results of this survey that appear relevant to local history and collection evaluation, and consider the implications for scalable evaluation of local history coverage in massive, aggregative digital libraries.