Are e‐books replacing print books? tradition, serendipity, and opportunity in the adoption and use of e‐books for historical research and teaching
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article aims to understand the adoption of e‐books by academic historians for the purpose of teaching and research. This includes an investigation into their knowledge about and perceived characteristics of this evolving research tool. The study relied on R ogers's model of the innovation‐decision process to guide the development of an interview guide. Ten semistructured interviews were conducted with history faculty between O ctober 2010 and D ecember 2011. A grounded theory approach was employed to code and analyze the data. Findings about tradition, cost, teaching innovations, and the historical research process provide the background for designing learning opportunities for the professional development of historians and the academic librarians who work with them. While historians are open to experimenting with e‐books, they are also concerned about the loss of serendipity in digital environments, the lack of availability of key resources, and the need for technological transparency. The findings show that R ogers's knowledge and persuasion stages are cyclical in nature, with scholars moving back and forth between these two stages. Participants interviewed were already weighing the five characteristics of the persuasion stage without having much knowledge about e‐books. The study findings have implications for our understanding of the diffusion of innovations in academia: both print and digital collections are being used in parallel without one replacing the other.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Scholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | Scholarly communication Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | medium |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it