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Summary

The world wide web is such a pervasive cultural phenomenon that it is easy to forget its relative infancy. Although the internet itself can trace its origins to ARPANET, the computer network developed by the US military in the late 1960s, the world wide web has a much more recent history. Its birth can, arguably, be assigned a very precise date: at 2:56:20 pm on 6 August 1991, the world's first website was made available on the public internet by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The privatization of the internet's backbone infrastructure in 1995 opened the door to commercialization, and its original academic and scientific usage was rapidly subsumed as public and commercial interest escalated. To describe its expansion, from that prototype system for information exchange within the high-energy physics community to the global information network of today, as dramatic is an understatement. By 2005, the public web was estimated to comprise over 11.5 billion web pages. And the public part of the web is the minority: the so-called ‘deep web’ – content which is inaccessible to search engines or to which access is controlled – is thought to be 500 times larger.

The technological development of the web has been equally remarkable. This can be illustrated graphically with examples of government websites taken from the collections of The National Archives of the UK. Figure 1.1 shows the home page of the Home Office website in 2000, and Figure 1.2 is taken from the same site in 2005.

The 2000 website, typically for its era, was primarily text-based, with only rudimentary graphical and design elements. Only five years later, the same site offers sophisticated graphics, intelligent searching, audio, video and animated content, and live news feeds. It is instructive and perhaps a little alarming to see how the technologies which, at the time, seemed exciting and innovative can, in such a brief period, come to appear so primitive.

During the course of this extraordinary growth, the web has evolved into perhaps the single most dominant communication channel in the world. The ‘Google generation’ not only search for information on the web, they also use it to shop, bank, watch television, chat to friends and family, book their holidays and play games.

Summary

Introduction

Quality assurance is an essential component of any web archiving programme. All collection methods involve some degree of automation, and it is therefore vital to ensure that the selection policy and collection list are actually being implemented successfully. The nature and degree of quality assurance which is required or practical will depend upon the needs and resources of the collecting agency, and the selection approaches and collection methods employed. In general, the greater the scale of collection undertaken, the more basic the level of quality assurance that can realistically be employed. This dictates that there is invariably a tradeoff between the number of resources that can be collected, and the quality control which can be applied to them, and a policy decision is required as to the minimum acceptable level of assurance.

Whatever the level of detail at which it is applied, any quality assurance process should follow the basic model illustrated in Figure 5.1 overleaf.

This chapter describes these processes in detail, and identifies some of the most commonly encountered problems and their possible solutions. It also discusses the cataloguing of archived websites. Some form of catalogue description is required in order to manage any archival collection, and make it accessible to users. Although cataloguing may take place at various stages in the web archiving process, it is included here because an important element of quality assurance is to ensure that all necessary cataloguing is accurate and complete.

Pre-collection testing

Pre-collection testing is concerned with the identification of potential issues that may affect the quality of collected content, in advance of its acquisition. It is clearly desirable to identify and resolve as many potential problems as possible prior to collection, thereby minimizing the extent of postcollection testing required. Pre-collection testing will typically include two approaches: resource analysis and test collection.

Resource analysis

This involves the manual or automated analysis of the target web resource, in order to identify the appropriate collection method and any issues that are likely to arise during collection. At the most basic level, it will be necessary to determine whether the website is static or dynamic in nature and, if the latter, whether all of the target resources are linked or only available through database queries.

Summary

Introduction

It is unsurprising that a medium such as the web, which combines global impact and accessibility with the facility for very intimate and individual interaction, raises a plethora of complex legal issues. It is equally predictable that the archiving of web content would therefore be subject to similar legal complexities. Legislation may affect many aspects of web archiving, including the collection of content, its preservation, and the dissemination of that content to users.

First, the moral rights of individuals or organizations may be affected, most notably rights to privacy and rights over the protection of intellectual property. These rights may potentially be infringed by a number of web archiving activities, including collection, preservation and delivery. Human rights must also be considered, especially in the context of disseminating potentially distressing or offensive material.

Second, tensions may exist between the requirements of the selection policy and the governing legal framework. For example, it may be necessary to collect material that contravenes libel or obscenity laws. This may have a fundamental impact on the processes of collection, and especially on delivery.

Finally, a collecting organization may well be constrained or driven by its own legislative requirements, or those governing its potential content suppliers. This may include archival or legal deposit legislation, freedom of information legislation, or the demands of regulatory compliance or public accountability.

The legal situation is further complicated by the fact that the web is multijurisdictional: a web archiving programme may well be collecting content from sources, and very likely delivering that content to users, in many different countries governed by a wide variety of legislative frameworks.

Any organization planning to implement a web archiving programme must therefore be aware of all relevant legal requirements, and consider their potential impact on that programme. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a detailed analysis of the specific national and international legislative requirements that may be relevant. Rather, this chapter provides a brief overview of the major issues to be considered, together with suggested sources of more detailed advice. It concentrates on examples from UK legislation, with reference to other regimes where appropriate.

Summary

Introduction

Any web archive requires some mechanism for allowing its designated community of users to access its content. This is true even if the only users are staff in the collecting organization. Such a delivery system needs to provide two basic functions: a means for users to discover content of interest and a means to deliver that content to the user in a meaningful form.

That meaningful form derives from two aspects of the archived content:

Summary

Introduction

This chapter describes various possible methods of collecting websites for archival purposes. The variety of approaches is dictated by the nature of web technology itself. This chapter therefore begins with a summary of website technology, before describing the various collection methods in detail. The strengths and limitations of each method are also considered. The design of a website can be an important factor in determining the ease with which it can be collected, and the range of methods appropriate. This chapter therefore also considers how webmasters can create ‘archive-friendly’ websites.

The technology of the web

The experience of using the world wide web arises from the interplay between two fundamental components – the web server and the web client, such as a web browser. A web server stores content, such as HTML pages and images, which it delivers, or ‘serves’, to a web browser in response to requests from that browser. A web browser requests content from web servers, and renders that received content for the user. The interaction between these two components is therefore as significant as the components themselves. Some form of communications protocol provides the mechanism by which this interaction takes place. The protocol defines a standard format for communications between the server and the browser. The most commonly used protocol on the web is the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Thus, when a browser sends a request to a server, that request takes the form of an HTTP ‘message’, as does the reply from the server.

All the content available on a web server is identified using a uniform resource locator (URL) – a reference which describes where on the web that content is located (see Chapter 3, Selection, for a more detailed discussion of URLs). The nature of URLs is one of the defining characteristics of the web, and creates a very indirect relationship between browsers and servers. Neither the browser nor the server need to know anything about each other, beyond the information contained within the HTTP message. Thus, a browser requests content by sending an HTTP request containing the relevant URL.

Summary

Focus questions

• What is the role of the library in dealing with electronic information?

• What is the place of the library in the information transfer process?

• What links should a collection management area have with other areas of the library, and with the wider organization?

• What changes in the publishing industry are impacting on collections management?

Our world is being transformed by the increasing availability of electronic information. Whether one is seeking the complete works of William Shakespeare or the latest perinatal statistics, these are now available electronically – somewhere. As a result, libraries everywhere are shifting their focus from building up collections to providing access to information. Many colourful phrases have been devised to describe this shift: from the collection which includes a particular item ‘just in case’ it may be needed to the document delivery service which provides it ‘just in time’; or from the ‘warehouse’ to the ‘wherehouse’ approach.

The popular perception is that this growing availability of electronic information both renders traditional, primarily paper-based resources – and the libraries that house them – increasingly irrelevant, and that the new electronic information resources themselves offer simplicity and transparency in access and use. Both perceptions are wrong. Throughout history, there have been many examples of new communication technologies complementing rather than supplanting their predecessors. The invention of the printing press did not lead to the demise of the handwritten letter. When radio was first introduced it was expected that it would lead to the demise of the telephone: why talk to simply one other person, when you could talk to many at the same time? Ludicrous as this suggestion now seems, the point is that both radio and telephony best serve differing purposes. The same applies to electronic and paper-based media.

We are now living through a period of change when questions of which communication media are best suited for what purposes are still being assessed through a process of global trial and error. What is certain is that both paper and electronic forms will survive.

Summary

Focus questions

• What are the reasons for collection evaluation?

• What procedures are involved in collection evaluation?

• What are the principal user-centred methods of collection evaluation?

• What are the principal collection-centred methods of collection evaluation?

Accountability, especially among public sector organizations, has become a driving force behind the growing emphasis on and interest in performance indicators. At one time collection managers were content to regard the size of a collection as the measure of its worth, but we have moved beyond this simplistic approach. As Magrill and East warned more than two decades ago,

… there are those who distrust the seemingly precise results obtained from manipulation of basic figures subjectively assigned. In some of the operations research applications, models are based on assumptions which cannot be verified by librarians in their day-to-day experiences with library users.

Today we are more inclined to use performance indicators to ‘prove’ that our funds are being expended in return for improved services that benefit the widest possible range of users. In terms of collection management, collection evaluation and review is essentially a means of gathering and assessing performance indicators about the use and strength of collections of information resources. Therefore, it is an essential component in the accountability process. The growing emphasis on accountability has been accompanied by significant advances in the ability of automated library systems to provide tailored management information reports that can be used for data collection and analysis, and this has facilitated the conduct and use of collection evaluation studies. Combine the current management ethos with technological capabilities, and we have the potential for revived interest in collection evaluation as part of collection management after a period of relative neglect.

In most countries developments along these lines have been relatively haphazard, or have focused on one specific aspect – for example, in the USA (and much less in Britain) these has been emphasis on Conspectus as the most appropriate approach to evaluation (see Chapter 3). In the UK a series of discrete reports, when combined, provide an excellent set of performance evaluation guidelines – most notably the compilation by Bohme and Spiller; these are discussed at some length by David Spiller.

Summary

Focus questions

• How does one establish the existence, availability and price of resources?

• What is the role of reviews in selection?

• In what ways might publishers’ and booksellers’ advertising assist?

This chapter takes as its starting point the proposition that selectors are faced with a series of decisions, some relatively small and easy, others relatively difficult and costly. To increase the probability of being right more often than wrong, it is essential to be armed with as much up-to-date and accurate information as is conveniently available. This will not guarantee the selection of only the necessary and best resources, but it should increase the likelihood of being right more often. As in all practical endeavours, there comes a time when the decision must be made regardless of the completeness or otherwise of the available information – to go beyond this time is not good professional practice.

In this chapter the various kinds of selection tools are divided into classes, and characteristics of the classes described. There are many problems with this approach, including the initial problem of devising a classification scheme, deciding which are the characteristics that distinguish one group from another, and deciding how to recognize and measure these characteristics. But if the aim is to understand the nature of selection tools, then general guidance of this kind rises above the detail of which tools happen to be available today, and should allow some underlying principles to be understood.

Any selection tool should do either or both of two things; if it does neither, it is worthless, but if it does both it can be remarkably useful:

Summary

Focus questions

• What is Conspectus?

• What is the role of Conspectus in a collection development policy?

• How might traditional approaches to Conspectus be updated to reflect the need to deal with electronic as well as print information sources?

Clearly, a collection development policy will be of little value if it does not say what a library has or intends to acquire or provide access to in any particular subject area. The Research Libraries Group (RLG) Conspectus approach has often been recommended to describe the collecting levels for various subject areas in a collection development policy. In fact it is the only widely acknowledged means of doing this. Despite its origins in research libraries, Conspectus is a tool relevant to many kinds of library. Accordingly, we need to describe Conspectus and give some indication of its strengths and weaknesses. Because the development of Conspectus predated the widespread availability of electronic information, in our view it needs to be updated to reflect this if it is to be of continuing relevance to the library community.

What is Conspectus?

Conspectus is

… a system which enables information about the collections of libraries and their collection development practices to be recorded in a relatively standardised way and which allows some detailed comparisons to be made between the collections of libraries involved. The term is used to refer both to the methodology involved in describing collections and to the database of standard collection descriptions that results.

It was developed by the RLG in the USA to describe collection strengths and collection development intentions in a uniform manner. Analysis is based on a library classification scheme, and strengths and collecting intentions are assessed against a set of more-or-less universally agreed categories ranging from 0 (out of scope – the library does not collect in this area) to 5 (comprehensive – the library attempts to collect exhaustively); see Figure 3.1.

RLG collection level codes are used by collection managers to indicate their subjective assessment of:

Summary

Focus questions

• How are most library budgets formulated?

• What are some of the advantages of outsourcing in materials supply?

• What are some of the problems associated with the prepayment of serials subscriptions, and what may be done to address these?

• What is the difference between commitment and expenditure, and why is this distinction important?

• Why do most larger libraries use some type of formula in the internal allocation of their materials budgets?

• What are some of the hidden cost implications of licensing of electronic media?

• What is the underlying purpose behind the audit of library systems and procedures?

The classic definition of a budget is that it is a plan expressed in financial terms. This book is not the place for an extensive discussion of the various approaches to budgeting, nor indeed to planning generally. Instead, in this chapter we will cover only those aspects of budgeting of particular relevance to collection management.

This chapter focuses on budget management, not on obtaining a budget in the first place. We are only too well aware that, for many libraries in developing countries, and for some in the developed world, fundraising is of much more immediate importance. Fundraising (‘library development’ in the USA) is a topic that deserves greater treatment than we can provide in the present volume. Readers are instead referred to the by now considerable literature on it. Another issue of concern to many libraries is budget cuts (or at least, failure to increase materials and other funding in line with increases in costs and usage). Again, there is a very large literature on this – in fact, at times it seems that every current professional journal issue makes some reference to the need for more realistic funding provision. This, too, is really outside the scope of the chapter.

It is worth noting that in many organizations, the whole budget process can be an intensely political area. Unless this is an sphere in which you are both skilled and comfortable, it is usually best to leave the question of an overall budget allocation for the library to others who are – perhaps the chief librarian, or powerful supporters elsewhere within your organization. On the other hand, those who find they do have these skills should also find both they and their library have an assured future.

Summary

Coverage

This select and annotated bibliography covers the area of collection management, largely as defined by the scope of this volume. It is limited to material published since 1990, as there are several excellent bibliographies covering earlier material (see, for example, the bibliographies of Thomas Nisonger listed below in ‘Collection evaluation and review’). Within this time span, the primary focus is upon more recent material as with the increasing introduction of electronic resources change has been so marked.

Arrangement

A conscious decision was taken not to arrange the material included here in the sequence of the chapters in this volume. This was for two reasons: first, each chapter already lists ‘Further reading’ as its final section. Second, there are some topics – such as copyright or government publications – which are discussed in several chapters. It seemed more useful to bring material on these topics together.

Following the general material which appears immediately below, items are grouped into broad subject areas, arranged alphabetically.

Collection management journal titles

Acquisitions Librarian

Against the Grain

www.against-the-grain.com/

The Bottom Line

Collection Building

Collection Management

Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services

Library Resources and Technical Services

Serials

The following titles are also worth checking for collection management articles.

Ariadne

www.ariadne.ac.uk

Australian Academic & Research Libraries

College & Research Libraries

D-Lib

www.dlib.org/

Electronic Library

Information Technology & Libraries

Journal of Academic Librarianship

Journal of Library Administration

Journal of Library and Information Science

Library Admin and Management

Library Hi Tech

Library Trends

General

AcqWeb

http://acqweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/acqweb/lis_cd.html [22 April 2001]. Provides comprehensive links to information and resources of interest to acquisitions or collection development librarians. Includes listservs. International in scope.

Atkins, S. (1996) Mining automated systems for collection management. Library Administration and Management, 10 (1), 16–19. Describes the way that data from library automated systems may be used for collection development planning and management, urging librarians not to waste this capacity.

Baker, D. (ed.) (1997) Resource management in academic libraries, Library Association Publishing. Includes chapters on academic libraries, resource management, old and new universities and colleges of advanced education, total quality management, performance indicators, costing, fund allocation and formulae, research collections, IT, operating costs and space planning. Four of the 16 chapters are by Baker.

Summary

Focus questions

• What environmental conditions are appropriate to facilitate the long-term preservation of library resources?

• What strategies have libraries adopted to ensure increased usage of materials does not place them at increased risk of damage?

• How might digital materials be preserved?

• Why is disaster planning important, and how might it be undertaken?

• What is the generally accepted basis of weeding?

• How might one go about deciding which serials to cancel?

• Should electronic media also be considered for weeding?

It may seem strange to deal consider together both preservation, arranging for the long term retention of information sources, and weeding. Are not these alternatives? However, both deal with decisions about the long-term value of materials: is this an item which we will always require? Or is it something which was acquired to meet a specific need, now past?

These two areas thus share a common core of professional decision making about the value of materials. Unfortunately, this in turn means they also share a common problem with the cost in terms of staff time of undertaking these activities. Weeding, in particular, can be daunting for librarians whose whole professional ethos is to gather, rather than discard – and at the end of it, what do you have? Only a few spaces on shelves, quickly filled. For this reason, too many libraries find it easier to leave materials, once acquired, generally available. The longer-term effect of this neglect is that material of continuing value may not be adequately protected, while a mass of items of little or no enduring value crowd the library's shelves and catalogues, making it harder to find current material. The library ends up looking like a bibliographic scrapheap.

Both preservation and weeding come at the end of the library information life cycle (see Figure 10.1). They are the final processes involved in managing information resources in libraries.

One of the core functions of libraries is to preserve real access to the documentary record. This is an activity that will give them, in common with archives, an enduring role in the wired world of the 21st century.

Summary

Focus questions

• Should libraries provide access to what clients say they want, or to what librarians believe they need?

• When is a decision not to select, censorship?

• What are some distinctive features of the various library environments in which selection takes place?

• What are some common strategies that assist in the selection process?

• What are the standard selection criteria that apply in most situations?

• What factors should a library take into account in choosing the format in which to acquire an item? Are electronic formats different?

• Why is bibliographic checking essential?

Selection of resources is one of the critical professional tasks of the librarian – as important as cataloguing or information service, for of what value are these if there are not information sources available? Selection has long been a topic of professional discussion, enabling consideration of current issues associated with digital data and the internet to be placed in a well-understood framework.

The dilemma of selection – needs and wants

In the third edition of Developing library and information center collections and also at http://lib.lmu.edu/dlc4 Edward Evans presents a detailed summary of what he terms the ‘theory’ of selection based on 11 major textbooks published between 1925 and 1985. The principles in this extended analysis can be summarized in very few words: either need versus want, or quality versus demand. From this dichotomy stem the key principles on which responsible and responsive selection is built.

The first principle is that the reader is the central focus of selection, the raison d’être on which collection development and information services are built. While one information professional may argue that the selection of library materials should aim at providing users with exactly what they want, another might maintain with equal conviction that the library should qualify this approach by selecting the best material available that meets the users’ demands. A third librarian may go further, stating that the library should select simply the best there is without worrying about demand.

Summary

Focus questions

• What is the purpose of co-operation, and what are the benefits?

• What are the barriers to co-operation, and how might they be overcome?

• What are the principal characteristics of effective resource-sharing management?

Resource sharing and co-operation, especially co-operative collection development, are essential components in collection management – and this has been the case rather longer than these have been ‘hot topics’ among information professionals. In the USA, for example, it has long been a part of professional practice, as the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies recognizes:

Cooperation among libraries is not a new phenomenon and, indeed, over a century of cooperation among librarians in the United States makes up the heritage of present day practitioners. That libraries should be able to work co-operatively to find access to information in distant collections which is not available locally is a deeply rooted concept in librarianship.

Co-operation occurs at many levels and in most areas of library service, from joint storage facilities and shared technical processing services to interlibrary loans (ILL) and reciprocal access for users. But this chapter is about co-operation at the level of collection development, with the intention of providing readers with access to a wider range of information resources.

Co-operative activities are becoming increasingly important for service delivery, primarily because of the ever-expanding availability of electronic data and improvements in telecommunications. Network access to online catalogues facilitates resource sharing at the item level – the only level of real interest to most clients. But having established that another library has what is wanted, how is it to be obtained? Network access to the electronic documents themselves poses a different set of problems. Some of these – including costs, access and preservation – were noted in Chapter 1. Book loans remain at the pace of ‘snail mail’ but journal articles, at least, can routinely be faxed to the requester. And there is good evidence that electronic service delivery results in greater usage of resources.

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Index

1 - Introduction

Summary

5 - Quality assurance and cataloguing

Summary

8 - Legal issues

Summary

Acknowledgements

Digital Preservation

7 - Delivery to users

Summary

4 - Collection methods

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1 - Managing information resources in context

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Frontmatter

9 - Collection evaluation and review

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6 - Selection resources

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Index

3 - Conspectus

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8 - Budget management

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Contents

The literature of collection management Adela Clayton

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10 - Preservation and weeding

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5 - Selection: policies and procedures

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4 - Resource sharing and co-operative collection development

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