DAHA User Needs Survey (Collection)

In July, 2017, Arizona State University's Center for Digital Antiquity, in partnership with the Amerind Foundation, was awarded a two year National Endowment for the Humanities grant (award #PW-253799-17) to build the Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology (DAHA) within tDAR, the Digital Archaeological Record. DAHA will be a comprehensive archive of reports on Huhugam (Hohokam) archaeology. When finished, we expect the archive to include the full text of more than 1,600 substantial documents from archaeologically significant locations in Arizona and northern Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico. The grant also supports the development of natural language processing tools that can be used to stimulate and enable innovative uses of the Archive that advance scholarship.

In year one of the grant, the DAHA team designed a survey to assess the relevant information-related needs and desires of the Archive’s key user communities: archaeologists and others working in cultural heritage management who are concerned with Huhugam archaeology. The survey questions were focused on two areas: what research questions are of most interest to the user communities, and what IT tools and technological support would enhance and expand the user experience with the DAHA digital library in tDAR.

The survey confirmed our beliefs that there is a perceived need for DAHA and that the archive will be heavily used by Huhugam archaeologists. The survey’s responses on how archaeologists use reports and what features they want to see in DAHA indicate that we should focus development on features that facilitate efficient discovery of the desired documents and that allow users to find or extract specific types of information they are looking for within reports. The survey results indicate that we should continue to pursue the software development as described in the proposal.