The Burlington Agenda: Research Issues in Intellectual Access to Electronically Published Historical Documents

As increasing numbers of primary historical documents appear on the World Wide Web, publishers of those documents will need ways to provide intellectual access to the contents. At a three-day meeting in Burlington, Vermont experts in experimental electronic publishing, library and information science research, documentary editing, and computer science research identified (1) the need for user studies to determine the needs and reactions of the audience(s), (2) the need to assess implications for change in publication management, and (3) the need to compare empirically various technological approaches to access to information as three areas of research that can contribute to our understanding of how to construct and improve intellectual access to historical documents on the Web.