Building Electronic Library Collections: The Essential Guide to Selection Criteria and Core Subject Collections

Citation

Dolphin, P. (2002), "Building Electronic Library Collections: The Essential Guide to Selection Criteria and Core Subject Collections", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 62-63. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.36.1.62.13

This is an A4‐sized paperback, with a clear typeface and layout and a good index. It is a very readable and accessible manual aimed at library professionals, which would also be particularly useful for library and information students. But its title and price led me to expect rather more than I got.

The aim of the book is explained in the preface. It is specifically concerned with “those Web‐based resources that librarians collect with a particular user group in mind”. Electronic libraries, the author explains, “usually appear as a compilation of links on a Web page or site maintained by a library”. So the book is intended for any librarian who wishes to develop or expand a “Web‐published collection of Web‐based resources”. The author intends to provide a guide to building such an electronic library as well as identifying core collections which might be included. UK readers would probably have expected the coverage of this book to be somewhat wider, since we would tend to define an electronic library as including electronic journals, databases, scanned documents and perhaps services such as electronic document delivery, in addition to collections of Internet sites brought together for users of the service.

The first chapter, “Developing an electronic library collection on the Web”, includes a short literature review and goes on to cover the basics (very few in fact) about hardware and staffing needed to embark on the project. More would have been useful, including costings, skills profiles and job descriptions, and an example of a collection development policy. There follows far more about the process of identifying and collecting Internet resources, and the application of various selection criteria such as access (e.g. does it take too long to load? Is it usually possible to reach the site?), design criteria (e.g. does it look and feel friendly?), or content (e.g. is the content unique? Has copyright been respected?). This chapter also covers security and privacy issues. There are very brief mentions of the problems of making the site accessible to users with disabilities and ensuring that the contents are archived.

The subsequent chapters cover different types of Web resource: ready reference resources, and information resources in business and employment, health and medicine, law, social, biological and hard sciences, and other resources including Web‐based education and current awareness. The author has created lists of the most popular Web sites in each area by undertaking surveys via librarians’ e‐mail lists. She lists these sites and many others, with a line or two of explanation, at the end of each chapter. As a result there are 53 pages of listings, comprising 25 per cent of the book. She has also included a number of “e‐builder stories” – short case studies interspersed within the chapters, such as descriptions of Cyberstacks at Iowa State University and the Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN) Web site. There are two case studies from beyond the USA: brief accounts of the development of Pinakes: a subject launch‐pad, based at Heriot‐Watt University and the University of Kent Web E‐library in New Zealand. The chapter on Web‐based legal information resources is probably the least relevant to the UK reader.

Unfortunately, the book lacked any real discussion of the value of this kind of work to students and others. Have any libraries attempted to evaluate the benefits of their e‐libraries? How do they compare with other resources in the modern hybrid library in terms of volume and ease of use, quality of content and popularity? Surely an essential part of building a collection is the monitoring of its use and measurement of its impact?

Two more negative points. There is a certain amount of repetition in the book, which I found irritating. For example, Table 3.1: Content criteria for Internet resources, takes up the whole of page 82. It is then repeated as Table 4.1 (page 111), Table 5.1 (page 133), Table 6.1 (page 148) and Table 7.1 (page 180). Also, a brief profile of the author would have been useful. What are her background and qualifications for writing the book? I assume that she is an academic rather than a practising librarian, since one e‐Library builder mentions having been taught by her.

The book has an accompanying Web site – details and the password are given in the preface. This includes some useful updates plus tutorials on HTML and Netscape Composer. However, at the time of writing this review no updates had been added for over a year.