This is the Director’s Cut of a review published in the Journal of the Society of Archivists in 2003.
Building an electronic resource collection - a practical guide
by Stuart D. Lee
(Library Association Publishing, 2002)
Dr Lee’s timely and accessible book is primarily aimed at librarians and students in the field of information science, and describes, in a practical and methodical way, major issues associated with building an electronic library, or, rather, with developing that ever-growing subset of library resources which these days come in an electronic format.
It deals with all key challenges that an IS professional is likely to encounter, from the initial formulation of a collection development policy, to the time when a decision must be taken to continue or discontinue an electronic resource. Many practical examples are given of the differing models of purchasing, licensing and usage that an institution may encounter when it begins acquiring a plethora of journals, abstracts, books and multimedia resources, whether through online subscriptions or the ubiquitous CD-ROM, and making them available to users.
Dr Lee describes the issues relating to all of the major classes of electronic resource to which we grow ever more accustomed: abstracting and indexing services, numerical collections, textbases, databases e-journals, e-books, multimedia products, news services. E-books get a little more coverage than I think they merit, given the protean state of this nascent technology, but they may yet achieve a greater foothold, and forewarned is forearmed.
More significant, of course, are the challenges of deploying CD-ROMs and networked resources. The software that drives a CD based collection of data is usually quite specific to a moment in time - a particular configuration of hardware and software that is not going to be around for ever, even if the CD survives. Networked resources - subscriptions to online services for journals, abstracts and indexes - have a different sort of volatility. Discontinuing a subscription to a printed journal will at least leave you with your own archive of the journal up until the time you stopped it, whereas cancelling the electronic subscription may deny you access to the entire collection, past and future. The financial and practical implications of failing to anticipate such consequences must not be underestimated.
Other important considerations include data security - making backups and establishing contingency measures where appropriate - and the modes and methods of user access to collections. The development of primary access points for users - gateway catalogues or “hubs” - involves all the challenges of presentation and design and integration of diverse systems. Ideally, these gateways should also facilitate the monitoring of resource usage and usability, which can in turn inform the decision to cancel or renew.
The book covers useful contextual material in a methodical way, and at its heart is the advice to collection developers not to be dazzled by the many challenges and different methods associated with acquiring, maintaining and deploying electronic resources. Rather, consider them seriously in relation to existing holdings, and assess them by the same criteria as paper resources. Be aware, however, of factors that are frequently taken for granted, such as the fundamental usability of a printed book or journal, without any need for additional hardware or software.
If I have a reservation, it concerns Dr Lee’s decision to co-opt to his own ends the word “dataset”. Like much of the vocabulary of Information Technology, it is at best a nebulous term, however in the field of digital archives and humanities computing I always understood it to be a useful, generic term for what the author refers to elsewhere as “numerical collections” and “textbases”. In this sense, it has the advantage that it does not imply adherence to any particular database management system or technology. It seems unhelpful to insist it mean only “commercially available electronic resources”, which is itself a perfectly acceptable description of the objects under discussion. The ICLC definition for “e-information”, which Dr Lee refers to, also seems an unambiguous and universally understandable term, though I can understand why anyone would baulk at the sheer ugliness of the word.
I was not entirely convinced by Dr Lee’s suggestion that the book also aims at a target audience in the publishing industry. Were that the case, a bit more evangelism might have been welcome, about how publishers themselves can alleviate problems faced by electronic library developers. Librarians and users alike should certainly do what they can to encourage publishers to develop integrated, platform-independent information delivery systems, building on the phenomenal potential of Web-based technologies. Similarly, using published, open standards for data storage and exchange is the best way to encourage integration and preserve data beyond the life of its initial host system. But of course publishers have much the same reservations about giving us those sorts of freedoms, as record companies do about us ripping and burning our own CDs!
If anything, the book is probably more valuable to IT specialists working for or alongside the library and archives community (and amongst which group I must count myself). This book has a lot to offer technical staff with whom librarians inevitably need to collaborate in delivering electronic resources, expounding as it does practical considerations which may not be immediately obvious to the ‘techies’ involved. It can also (notwithstanding my concern about what is a dataset) form a good basis for building an inter-disciplinary vocabulary for professionals in IS and IT.
Above all this book will be of considerable use and interest to library and archives professionals tasked with defining an institutional strategy for building an electronic reference collection. Like any good practical guide, it is methodical, and authoritative, offering a ready-made framework on which to build one’s own specific strategy. If anyone is still in the position of starting from scratch, this book is a concise and lucid account of how to go about it. Far more likely, though, is that the present generation of librarians and archivists are currently managing hydra-like collections of heterogeneous and incompatible electronic resources. For these too, this book offers a path through the labyrinth, with much excellent common-sense advice, caveats and practical examples. Many librarians will be familiar with at least some of the scenarios described, and can profit from learning about others which they will no doubt encounter in the future. Building an electronic resource collection represents many different and novel challenges, but this book demonstrates that the goal is best achieved by continuing to draw on the experience of centuries of librarianship, even as we start depending more on compact discs than codices.
