BIBLIO-NOTES

News from the Chair

What is the future of bibliographers in academic libraries? With the Internet, shrinking budgets, approval plans, and an ever-increasing complexity and number of responsibilities, it seems that the role of collection building has been relegated to a low priority. I think of this every time I register for an ALA Conference, and try to fill out the category describing my position. There is no choice for bibliographer. There is one for acquisitions, reference, and administration (and others); a bibliographer combines elements of all of these, and more, but does not appear as its own category.

I suppose that there is not a long tradition of bibliographers in most U.S. academic libraries until the 1950s and later, faculty members of various departments made selection decisions for the library. At a retirement party recently, a long-time bibliographer at Indiana University read a memo she had found in her files from the late '50s, from several faculty members to the University Librarian. They requested that librarians with appropriate subject knowledge be hired to develop the collections, because the faculty members did not feel they had time, and they were tired of dealing with the "Order Department"(!)

Indiana created positions for full-time bibliographers in the early 1960s, being among the first in the country to do so. The librarians who were hired built wonderful collections, in what seems like a Golden Age. As they retire, we are losing contact with the real giants of our profession, and in many cases, their successors are asked to cover more disciplines and responsibilities.

At most libraries these days, full-time bibliographers are seen as a luxury. And perhaps they are. Area studies bibliographers believe themselves to be in a crisis, and have organized several conferences to discuss ways to train a new generation of bibliographers. I fear that the same may be happening to subject librarians as well, that as libraries succumb to budgetary pressures and begin to outsource collection development through approval plans, that the unique materials, those items that require 90% of my collection development time, will no longer be acquired.

Perry Willett, Chair
EALS

Task Force Formed for the Preservation of Primary Records

Following the Modern Language Association's Statement on the Significance of Primary Records in May 1995, there has been widespread discussion on listervs, at professional conferences (including the EALS meeting in New York last July), and elsewhere on the value of primary materials in our libraries.

The impetus for the original MLA statement was the perception that primary materials are coming under increasing threat from a wide variety of forces including physical deterioration, deaccessioning practices, as well as microfilming and digitization programs. One element of the MLA's concern was the perception that digitization was coming to be seen not simply as an enhancement to search capabilities or to access but as an acceptable replacement for the original artifact altogether. As the MLA committee expressed it, "new forms cannot fully substitute for the actual physical objects in which earlier texts were embodied at particular times in the past," and the committee added, "the MLA believes that it is crucial for the future of humanistic study to make more widely understood the continuing value of artifacts themselves."

While the MLA statement reaffirmed the modern language community's dependence on primary materials, it did not address issues of cost that inevitably inform librarians' decisions about individual items held in college and research libraries.

Since that time, a Task Force for the Preservation of Primary Records has been formed to take the original MLA committee's work a step further and look at issues surrounding the implementation of such a broadly based theoretical statement. The Task Force, which held its first meeting at the Library of Congress this past Fall, is composed of representatives from a number of scholarly societies, ARL, and the Society of American Archivists.

At the Fall meeting, the group discussed two main strategies for moving forward: first, a public relations campaign to educate the scholarly community and the public about the value of the artifact and, second, the identification of selection criteria for the preservation of artifacts within libraries. A second meeting was held in early March where it was agreed librarians themselves are actively addressing many of the concerns raised by the Task Force. For that reason, the group decided not to attempt to draft uniform criteria for the preservation of primary materials but, instead, to prepare a document that would further educate the academic community about the issues involved in the preservation and use of the artifact and that would suggest ways scholars can help in preservation efforts on their own campuses.

These discussions have been fruitful in a number of ways. The original MLA statement affirmed the importance of primary materials to the research community and served as a useful reminder of the significance of our preservation decisions. While the most recent discussions raise the issue of costs, these discussions also acknowledge the critical role librarians have in managing library collections . The document now being prepared promises to affirm not only the importance of the artifact but also to affirm the role librarians play in establishing preservation priorities in our own institutions. It promises as well to lead to further collaboration and consultation between librarians and our colleagues in the English Department.

EALS members with an interest in the issues surrounding primary materials may wish to join the ongoing discussions of the Ad-Hoc Committee on the MLA Statement. For more information contact:

New Periodicals for Literary Research: One Library's Selection Decisions

Several months ago a subscriber to EALSL requested recommendations for new periodicals that would support literary research. Rob Melton supplied, as a fillip to discussion, a list of titles that were ordered by his institution, the University of Kansas. The list includes only scholarly journals or intellectual quarterlies, not literary magazines; some of them are cited in Katz's Magazines for Libraries (8th edition).

The list was received so favorably that the Editor has decided to reprint it below. Note that the list is not meant to be comprehensive; other libraries might have different research and curricular priorities.

Rob Melton
University of Kansas Libraries
rmelton@ukanvm.cc.ukans.edu

Product Review: Literature Online (LION)

Literature Online, a new service from Chadwyck-Healey, offers considerable promise but has a few drawbacks. This database, also known as LION, consists primarily of the full texts of public-domain English and American literature written or published between 600 and the early twentieth century.

By June, 1997, this constantly growing resource is to offer 210,000 poems, 4,000 plays including eleven major editions of Shakespeare from the First Folio to the 1863-1866 Cambridge edition 290 works of fiction, and twenty-one versions of the English Bible. In addition to these resources gathered by LION, the database provides hypertext links to 15,000 more texts from such sources as the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, the University of Toronto English Library, the Bartleby Library, and A Celebration of Women Writers. As a result, searches for works by major figures often result in duplication of titles. For example, a search for poems by Emily Dickinson yields 1,055 matches.

LION's Master Index allows the searcher to look for materials by author or title keyword or by browsing lists of authors and titles. The Master Index's searching capability takes some getting used to and is perhaps the weakest component of this product. Clicking on a name or title from the browse list, for example, results in that information filling the search box on another screen rather than simply going to the title or author selected. The basic search screen and the browse lists should be on the same screen.

Charles Dickens appears in the browse list twice for no apparent reason since selecting either will lead to the same results. A writer whose first and last names are both common ones creates all sorts of problems. A search for "henry james" results in one work by Henry James Byron and eighty-five by Henry James Pye. A search for "james, henry" results in 185 works by Henry James Leigh Hunt and five by the master himself. Since LION does offer boolean searching, "james, henry" NOT "hunt" yields the desired results. LION also features the proximity operators NEAR and FBY (followed by) as well as a supposedly more precise operator EXACT, but using EXACT with "henry james" or "james, henry" creates the same results as not using it. The generally useful help screens fail to assist here.

An hour or so of random and specific searching can lead to an understanding of the Master Index's quirks and ways of getting around them. Whether an undergraduate with limited searching skills will have the patience to do so is another matter. Needed additional features include extending keyword searching to the texts themselves and providing links to brief biographical matter. How many searchers are going to know who Henry James Pye is when they stumble across him? A minor annoyance is that the texts from Chadwyck-Healey appear flush left when they should be displayed in the center of the screen. Texts from other databases are usually more pleasing to the eye.

LION's reference component includes the Bibliography of American Literature (BAL), which, in addition to providing bibliographic records of 40,000 works by three-hundred American writers, offers black-and-white closeups of the textures of some cloth bindings. Such a feature obviously helps in determining if a volume has been rebound. Such resources as this and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), to be added in April, make LION perhaps more useful for graduate students and faculty than to any other audience.

LION (http://lion.chadwyck.com/) also offers links to discussion groups and lists, an electronic bookshop, and a printing service for bound copies of its titles. A subscriber can take the entire LION package or only parts of it. This factor and the number of concurrent users given access determine the cost. Trial subscriptions are available. While LION in its initial form has some deficiencies, searchers with patience will benefit, particularly from having full-text resources from a variety of sites gathered in one place.

Michael Adams
Mina Rees Library
City University of New York Graduate School
mta@aquila.gc.cuny.edu

Recent Studies of Interest to English and American Literature Librarians
by Scott Stebelman