Introduction
From February to March, 1945, Filipino, American and Japanese soldiers and civilians experienced one of the largest urban battles in history. At the end of the Battle of Manila, over 100,000 people had died. The scale of loss of life was similar to lives lost as a result of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Much of the capital city of Manila was left in ruin and hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless. Centuries of cultural history including architecture, artwork, and historical documents held in archives were also destroyed. The devastation to human life and cultural memory were enormous. Eighty years later, Filipino researchers still struggle to find primary source materials and government records that were lost.
In June 2003, the University of Michigan Library launched the digital collection now titled The United States and its Territories, 1870 - 1925: The Age of Imperialism. The collection contains over 4,000 full texts of monographs and government documents published in the United States, Spain, and the Philippines between 1870 and 1925 and housed in the University of Michigan Library's Southeast Asia collection.
For the past 20 years, tens of thousands of people have accessed the Philippines digital collection. In 2024, our web statistics showed that 75% of all the users were located in the Philippines, and the average views per user were twice as much for users in the Philippines as for those in other countries. With such strong engagement from Filipino users, we wanted to better understand why they visit this digital collection. We also saw high bounce rates (very short-duration page views with no interactions) for certain pages within the collection, and we wanted to understand why users left these pages so quickly. What were they expecting? What did they hope to find in our digital collection?
While analytics provided us a scale for how often people visited or left the site we needed a deeper understanding of the contexts surrounding why people engaged or didn’t engage with the digital collection content. For this reason, we chose to use contextual inquiry interviews as a method to both observe people using the site and to ask questions about their choices, behaviors, and feelings in the context of using the collection. Over Zoom video, we were able to meet with Filipino researchers remotely at times convenient for them. But how would we connect with and recruit Filipino researchers who use our website who were halfway around the world and who we didn’t have direct relationships with?
Recruiting and scheduling participants from the Philippines
In early planning in fall 2023 for our research on the Philippines collection, I’d pitched the idea to Jackson Huang, a member of our digital collection team, who was working with the collection, that connecting with and interviewing 5-6 Filipino researchers would be relatively easy. Jackson had connections to faculty in the Southeast Asian Studies Department who did research on the history of the Philippines. We turned to the collection owner and librarian, Fe Susan Go, and asked about connections she had to researchers in the Philippines. At the same time, another member of our digital collections team, Chris Powell, who had been instrumental in working with Susan on launching and maintaining the collection, shared a list of Filipino researchers who had submitted help or feedback tickets in the last few years. This list was a perfect place to start building our recruitment pool.
I reached out directly to these Filipino researchers, inviting them to participate in one-hour contextual inquiry interviews and providing a simple “Book an appointment” link to Google Calendar. Typically, recruitment and scheduling sessions take between 3-10 days depending on the audience we’re trying to reach. After sending our initial email invitations, we booked appointments with 3 researchers for the end of January.
At the end of each interview, we asked for referrals and we started getting names of more researchers. We also reached out to universities and colleges in the Philippines in cities where we saw high traffic in web analytics, inviting them to share our invitation and screener survey with students and faculty. Although we had a few responses to screener questions that gave us valuable data on the overall usage and attitudes of invited Filipino researchers, our email approach for booking appointments with cold contacts wasn’t working as well as we hoped.
Then, a possible reason for the low email response rate came into focus. During one interview a participant mentioned that many people in the Philippines use Facebook and Facebook Messenger for information and communications in place of email. One student even mentioned paying tuition via Facebook! With this new insight, we started reaching out to people and institutions via Facebook Messenger. Unfortunately, these didn’t yield as many replies as we’d hoped, as well.
The best way we found to build our network was through those who had already participated. Our referral questions at the end of interviews yielded additional warm leads that helped us schedule with more Filipino researchers.
Ultimately, we spoke to 6 researchers outside the U.S. Although our sample might have been less diverse due to recruitment through smaller networks, our participants provided a wide range of perspectives, expertise, and experiences seeking research materials in digital collections. From academic researchers turned faculty to prominent cultural and historical researchers, we were lucky to meet with people who had years and even decades of experience using the Philippines digital collection. Their research experiences were deep and authentic providing us a deeper understanding of their goals, challenges, and opportunities to improve their experience.
Insights from our interviews
Our contextual inquiry interviews sought to answer questions related to three main research objectives:
- Deepen our understanding of how Filipino researchers feel about the Philippines digital collection, a unique collection of historical material. Listen, observe, and understand the value of the materials represented in the Philippines digital collection in supporting their research and in comparison to similar online sources for related historical materials.
- Define and document researcher goals, expectations, behaviors, and challenges when using the Philippines digital collection to find promising materials to support their research.
- Investigate and document the expectations Filipino researchers have around the ownership, maintenance, and care of the digital materials and the physical collections they are drawn from. Describe how researchers feel about repatriation, and reparative practices, and how those practices apply to these materials.
Our six contextual inquiry interview sessions were spread out over 8 weeks. With this longer timeframe, we had the chance to deeply analyze our interview data, to work with our development team to identify and resolve low-effort, high-impact interface fixes. We also identified long-term recommendations based on consistent researcher needs for core functionality and desires around inclusion and relationship building independent of technology.
This article will describe insights from the interviews related to how the digital collection influenced Filipino researchers’ work. A follow-up article will describe how we worked to improve researchers’ experience by improving the digital collection interface itself.
Insights: Impact of The Collection
Filipino researchers’ impressions and use of the Philippines digital collection were overwhelmingly positive. We learned that for twenty years, generations of researchers had used and then referred other researchers to the “treasure trove” of materials available in the Philippines collection. For many years, it has been THE singular source to find historical documents about the early twentieth century in the Philippines, and it is a foundational resource even as other materials are digitized and made available in digital collections throughout the world.
Filipino researchers expressed that the historical content available in the collection was essential to their research and that usability issues related to the legacy collection were sometimes annoying but never deal breakers. Many viewed UI or usability challenges as typical of the many online digital collections they used for research.
Insights: Fundamental User Needs
Two user needs and goals helped inform many small usability fixes and revealed other long-term priorities for our future platform:
- Researchers’ top goal was to quickly find and immerse themselves in these historical documents. Every interaction, feature, and page on our site needed to contribute to this goal of getting to item views and image viewers quickly.
- While in the discovery phase of their research, researchers wanted to find and download complete items (reports, etc.) vs. single pages from digital collections. Researchers especially wanted to download a whole PDF of an item so they could do multiple keyword searches on their own desktops on their own timelines. For Filipino researchers, this need to conduct research locally on their own machine and timeline could have been influenced by limited internet speeds or availability and the desire to conduct research activities independent of internet availability.
Insights: Cultural Heritage and Cultural Memory
Our third objective, understanding the expectations of Filipino researchers around the original or digitized materials and collections related to Philippine history held at the University of Michigan yielded important findings in many ways.
We learned that Filipino researchers' top goal was to access historical documents through open, free, and well-maintained digital collections. While many historical researchers want to engage with historical documents in person in archives close to their locations, searching and accessing these items online increased the overall ease of discoverability and access for global audiences. Filipino researchers wanted these materials to remain available in perpetuity and for physical items to be preserved for future digitization efforts and use.
We also heard about the value that research, reparations, and repatriation aided by digital collections have on cultural memory. Several researchers we talked with had been instrumental in organizing and leading cultural heritage memory events and projects, from celebrating 500 years since Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition to the Philippines to the repatriation of Balangiga bells from multiple sites in the United States to the Philippines in 2018. Researchers described how these efforts aided by many different digital collections had brought back cultural heritage awareness, renewed interest, and healing to Filipino communities.
Filipino researchers appreciated the continued and sustainable resources that have been allocated at the University of Michigan to care for and improve access to historical documents in the Philippines digital collection. Our research recommendations included opportunities to use plain language to describe the collection and its sources, and to cross-link related online collections at the University of Michigan regardless of the departments or units who created or maintain them. We also conveyed the desire researchers had to engage more often and more intentionally with collection owners and our digital collections team to improve metadata, describe collections in ways best understood by the top user audiences, and continue to steward these important cultural resources.
The top theme we heard again and again, is that Filipino researchers came to the Philippines digital collection looking to find and immerse themselves in digitized scans of historical texts, illustrations, and photographs that made history come alive through contextually rich primary source materials. Even though the texts were scanned twenty years ago, the content and context were a “treasure trove” for researchers seeking information about people, places, and topics from 20th century Philippine history.
Lessons and Reflection
The generosity of Filipino researchers in meeting with us and sharing their experiences, goals, challenges, and lives led to transformative improvements for our interface but interacting with them also transformed how I see our digital collections and the University of Michigan’s place within world events and history. While I felt great sadness for the suffering and loss Filipino people have faced throughout the twentieth century, I felt great hope and motivation to push for more inclusive practices in the ways our teams in LIT and in the library work together with collection owners and the peoples or groups that our digital collections content represent.
It’s easy to get lost in the important day to day practices of maintaining technical infrastructure and tools but building relationships with the people we are privileged to serve and to provide resources to is just as important. Relationship management is not just for leadership or librarians. It is an enlivening and sustaining part of doing difficult operational work, it motivates and aligns us in doing the best and most often the hardest work of meeting people where they are, and it provides them with the best solutions to their current challenges and needs.
Many participants we spoke with have close ties with the University of Michigan Library, Archives, etc. They are adjunct faculty, future graduate students, etc. We are lucky to know them and to learn from their perspectives, experiences, and lives. Engaging with them improves the accuracy, discoverability, and value of our digital collections in ways we would never think of ourselves.
We look forward to future opportunities for research and design with individual Filipino researchers, and other audiences who use our digital collections. We also look forward to serving as a bridge between developers, product and service managers, collection owners, and novice and expert end users who spend significant time and effort in utilizing digital collections materials to accomplish their research.
I want to thank Ruikun Wang, Jackson Huang, Chris Powell, Fe Susan Go, Kat Hagedorn, Robyn Ness, Ricky Punzalan, Ambeth Ocampo, Raphael Canillas, and our other Filipino researchers who participated in or helped recruit participants for this study and for those who have used the Philippines collection for years if not decades.