Principles of Selection for Electronic Resources

Library Trends, Spring, 2000 by Paul Metz

ABSTRACT

THE AVAILABILITY IN ELECTRONIC FORMAT OF scholarly and scientific literatures and other forms of information relevant to the needs of library users has profoundly altered the challenges faced by collection managers. Although the traditional goals of achieving quality, relevance, and balance at a fair price still animate most collection-development efforts, judgments about these attributes of resources have become more ambiguous. The traditional standards have also been joined by new and highly important criteria which include the definition of the allowable user group and the purposes for which use will be permitted, multi-faceted concerns about the functionality of resources, and concerns about the availability of permanent archives. Drawing heavily on the ideas of the multi-library consortia, which have grown up partly in response to the advent of electronic resources, librarians have devised new criteria and means of assessing resources against them so that cost-effective acquisitions can be made in the new marketplace.

INTRODUCTION

It is a truism that academic libraries at the end of the twentieth century are caught between the demands of a traditional print-bound world of priceless resources built up over generations by their predecessors and those of "a new (electronic) world being born."

On the one hand, libraries struggle to find shelf space for burgeoning print collections, to slow the damage to highly acidic print collections being eroded by environmental pollutants--light, rough handling, and fluctuations of heat and humidity--and to maintain serial subscription lists which have been subjected to double-digit inflation nearly every year. On the other hand, libraries rush to meet the growing expectations of their highly computer-literate clientele.

Someplace along the way we seem to have leap-frogged from a recent past when the library tried to persuade skeptical users of the potential of electronic resources, to a present in which every user is an accomplished Web-surfer certain that every kind of information must be available and could be delivered to her library if only the staff understood. The days already seem distant when one heard about strategies to marshal grants, new money, or funds scratched together from small savings here and there to pay for electronic resources as an add-on. Every academic library of any size can now point to a significant conversion from print to e-resources, and hardly anyone bothers with the fiction that the latter has not come, to some degree, at the expense of the former.

Does this mean that everything you ever knew is wrong? Are the traditional standards of selection moot and, if they are not, how do they share space with the criteria of evaluation and selection specific to electronic media? What are the macro and micro considerations that bear on selection of electronic resources, and how do they relate to traditional criteria? These are the questions with which this essay will wrestle. Most of its examples will be taken from the world of academic librarianship, which has been most aggressive in its movement toward electronic access and in which the author dwells.

TRADITIONAL CRITERIA VERSUS NEW STANDARDS

The chief responsibility of a collection manager is to bring together a grounded understanding of her community and its information needs with a sophisticated and informed understanding of the publications universe. Decisions are taken on both a macro level (how large an approval plan should we have? with which publishers?) and a micro level (is this book appropriate? worth its price? and likely to be used?) to achieve balanced and affordable collections serving the main needs of the community at a variety of levels. The introductory statement of Virginia Tech's collection development policy (http://www.lib.vt.edu/info/colldev/ coll_dev_policies/GOALS.html) could probably represent the aspirations of most academic libraries:

   Collection development in the Virginia Tech University Libraries serves
   several purposes. Much the most significant of these is to satisfy the
   university's current needs for information resources in any format which
   will support its primary missions of teaching, research, and service. Our
   collection-building efforts reflect as nearly as possible the programmatic
   goals of Virginia Tech.

      Other goals shaping our collection development efforts are to build
   collections which will support in at least a basic way future university
   programs or areas of specialty; to furnish some basic support for the needs
   of the university's non-academic units; to provide some materials in nearly
   all areas of knowledge partly as a basis for users' self-education; and to
   serve as an information resource for other, primarily in-state, libraries
   with whom we enjoy partnerships.

   Within the context of these goals, the two stars which guide our efforts
   are the academic relevance and the quality of the materials we seek to add
   to our collections.