Principles of Selection for Electronic Resources

THEAVAILABILITY 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 Paul Metz, Virginia Tech University Libraries, P. 0.Box 90001, Blacksburg, VA 24062-9001 LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 48, No. 4, Spring 2000, pp. 711-728