Love's Labour's Lost: The Failure of Traditional Selection Practice in the Acquisition of Humanities Electronic Texts

THELIBRARY LITERATURE FROM THE LATE nineteenth century to the present offers numerous rational well-intentioned guides to the selection of materials. Yet, collection development policies and lists of selection criteria are inadequate for humanities electronic texts. Libraries, humanities disciplines, and electronic texts are too complex for any rigid approach to acquisition. In order to meet goals and satisfy users, libraries must abandon traditional practices and adopt new ones for these resources. INTRODUCTION Bibliographic databases have the universal appeal of collecting scholarly knowledge and providing quick electronic retrieval with powerful search interfaces-users no longer search page after page, volume after volume, of title after title. Electronic journals have the universal appeal of desktop delivery-users no longer make trips to the library to photocopy or read articles. Full-text article databases (EBSCO’s Academic Search Elite, Bell & Howell’sProQuest,Lexis-Nexis’Academic Universe, etc.) have the same universal appeal plus instant gratification during bibliographic searchesusers no longer search journal titles in OPACs and then head to the stacks to photocopy articles. Electronic texts, on the other hand, do not offer such universal appeal and so are not easy purchase decisions for collection development librarians. Librarians typically use collection development policies and standardized lists of selection criteria to make or break purchase decisions (Norman, 1997).However, this rational approach fails Beau David Case, Ohio State University Libraries, Language and Area Studies Department, 1858 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1286 LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 48, No. 4, Spring 2000, pp. 729-747 02000 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 730 LIBRARY TRENDS/SPRING 2000 when applied to humanities electronic texts, because these resources appeal to small user groups with idiosyncratic needs and varied levels of technological competence. This article, using a definition by Hockey (1994), defines an electronic text, or e-text, as “primary source material in the humanities rather than journals and reference works. Such texts may be literary works (prose, verse, drama), historical papers, letters and memoranda, charters, papyri, inscriptions” (p. 677). Outside the scope of this article are digital libraries created in-house-e.g., those at the University of Iowa (Dewey & Hughes, 1999) and Emory University (Spornick, 1998)-because these databases employ varied media, emphasize archive creation over use, and are primarily important to local or regional users. This article also excludes from discussion public domain e-texts such as those of Oxford Text Archive, Perseus Project, and Project Gutenberg,’ because these resources pose other problems unrelated to acquisitions. Thus, this article focuses on commercial products such as ChadwyckHealey’sEnglish Verse Drama. The history of selection theory over the past century is quite consistent, whether considering books or the newer media of microforms, audiovisual materials, and electronic resources. A review of the library literature from the late nineteenth century to present yields several basic criteria categories relevant to humanities electronic texts, including price, demand and use, library infrastructure, and product interface. Each criterion will fail when applied to e-texts. Instead, libraries must develop new flexible acquisition methods if they are to fulfill their mission and if they are to satisfy their clientele.