Collection Development Issues in the Online Environment

Citation

Bogstad, J.M. (2010), "Collection Development Issues in the Online Environment", Collection Building, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 80-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604951011040215

A collection of 11 articles divided into three sections (five articles in “Common Issues”, three in “Special Issues”, and three in “Future Issues”), this work offers both immediately practical overviews and suggestions regarding specific problem areas and highly speculative projections of future issues, and also addresses more centrally the context of academic libraries. All articles in the collection are interesting, but quite varied in style, scope and intensity, some necessitating a second reading. Likewise, neither individually nor as a group, do the papers consider the contemporary range of online issues. In fact full‐text online books receive little attention. Nevertheless, this reviewer, a librarian in charge of licenses, budgeting, and managing the selection process for electronic productions that serve a largely undergraduate library, found several of the articles to be relevant to immediate problems, despite the fact that the majority address practices at non‐US libraries (Canada, Australia, UK).

As might be expected, the first five common issues have the broadest value. Three in fact would be useful reading to any group trying to charge the hazardous course through our contemporary transition from paper‐ to electronic‐based academic collections. Of particular note are:

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  Crothers, Prabhu and Sullivan, “Electronic journal delivery in academic libraries”;

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  Lawal, “Electronic reference works and library budgeting dilemma”; and

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  Wallenius, “Are electronic serials helping or hindering academic libraries?”.

The third of these, addressing budget trade‐offs, was particularly useful as a thought exercise. However, one of the special issues articles in section two, “DMCA, CETA, UCIGA … Oh MY! An overview of copyright law … ” by Lee and Wu will help even the neophyte in US legal matters to identify the central concerns as they have manifested themselves over the last couple of decades, in the ongoing contest between author, (read here, publishers) rights and fair use. Although one may need to read this article twice, it is ultimately as immediate as it is informative. For example, it looks at the history of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act, October 1998) with its intent to more specifically ensure authors' rights to the content of electronic documents, by laying out both the provisions and the ambiguities of this sweeping legislation for fair use in the context of library collections. While each set of legislation is briefly detailed, it is also interrelated – another useful feature of this article.

The last three articles take the reader into more imaginative realms, such as the last which addresses the conditions under which a library might decide to go the route of PDA provision of journal articles, an eventuality so economically far‐fetched for most academic and public libraries as to be fantasy. Nevertheless, the issues of expense, provision of content as well as reading devices are carefully detailed.