Mobile Device Policies in Archive Reading Rooms

摘要

Humanities scholars increasingly use mobile devices such aslaptops, iPhones, and iPads in their professional lives. Weare exploring the opportunities for employing such devicesfor supporting scholarly activities in archive reading rooms.As a first step in this process, we are studying how readingroom policies related to the use of technological devicesimpact scholars’ interaction with the source materials interms of capturing, organizing, note taking, and recordkeeping for future use of found materials. We studied thepolicy documents made available by thirty archives andcomplemented the results by soliciting the perspectives ofadministrators who craft these policies and scholars who usethese archives. We present our analysis and an earlyprototype of a policy awareness mobile application calledAMTracker.