  The transition from analogue to digital archives and the recent explosion of
online content offers researchers novel ways of engaging with data. The crucial
question for ensuring a balance between the supply and demand-side of data, is
whether this trend connects to existing scholarly practices and to the average
search skills of researchers. To gain insight into this process we conducted a
survey among nearly three hundred (N= 288) humanities scholars in the
Netherlands and Belgium with the aim of finding answers to the following
questions: 1) To what extent are digital databases and archives used? 2) What
are the preferences in search functionalities 3) Are there differences in
search strategies between novices and experts of information retrieval? Our
results show that while scholars actively engage in research online they mainly
search for text and images. General search systems such as Google and JSTOR are
predominant, while large-scale collections such as Europeana are rarely
consulted. Searching with keywords is the dominant search strategy and advanced
search options are rarely used. When comparing novice and more experienced
searchers, the first tend to have a more narrow selection of search engines,
and mostly use keywords. Our overall findings indicate that Google is the key
player among available search engines. This dominant use illustrates the
paradoxical attitude of scholars toward Google: while provenance and context
are deemed key academic requirements, the workings of the Google algorithm
remain unclear. We conclude that Google introduces a black box into digital
scholarly practices, indicating scholars will become increasingly dependent on
such black boxed algorithms. This calls for a reconsideration of the academic
principles of provenance and context.
