Humanities Collections, Vol. 1

Citation

Hodes, J. (1998), "Humanities Collections, Vol. 1", Collection Building, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 180-180. https://doi.org/10.1108/cb.1998.17.4.180.2

Humanities Collections is a new journal devoted to primary and secondary humanities collections. While technology issues such as digitisation will be covered, the core focus will be on collections, with an international forum sought and inter‐disciplinary articles encouraged where appropriate. Contributions on primary and secondary collections will be supplemented by relevant articles on specific issues relating to primary collections, especially conservation and storage and the use of technology to promote accessibility. Bibliographies, essays, reviews and works in progress will all find a home here.

The inaugural editor is Robin Kinder, a reference librarian at William Allan Nielson Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and adjunct lecturer in the School of Information Science and Policy, State University of New York at Albany, New York. She is also an Associate Editor of The Reference Librarian and The Acquisitions Librarian. In her editorial introduction she questions whether there is a place for a journal of this kind, given the growth in technology, and proceeds to make a persuasive case for a journal of this type by noting the opportunities new technologies provide for increasing accessibility to primary and secondary collections and the profound impact this will have on humanities scholarship.

This issue consists of six articles and a lengthy review. The contributions range from the scholarly and traditional to the impact of the Web on the humanities. Collection‐focused articles include an examination of the Frances Hooper Collection of Virginia Woolf Books and Manuscripts by Karen Kukil; the Edward Clark Collection at Napier University, Edinburgh, which illustrates and describes the history and development of printing and publishing, by Sarah Forbes; a tribute to the work of Roger Tory Peterson, an author of popular guides to birds, by Sarah Van Arsdale.

Technology‐focused articles cover the effectiveness of searching for information on the subject of literature on the Web and the development of improved finding and retrieval systems as well as the implications of using the Web as a research tool, by Byron Anderson; an examination of the Voice of the Shuttle: Web page for humanities research, written by its originator, Dr Alan Liu (http://humanitas.ucsb. edu).

There is an annotated bibliography of Basque linguistics and literature resources by Martha Zarate, and the review by Robin Kinder examines and evaluates three women’s studies databases. Forthcoming papers will include the Women Presses Library Project, information seeking in interdisciplinary fields, the diaries of Conrad Liberman, the humanities text initiative, the Jewish National Library: Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts.

This journal provides an additional dimension to the field of humanities collection development and collection evaluation and will be of value to academic libraries and humanities departments.