Approaches to Selection, Access, and Collection Development in the Web World: A Case Study with Fugitive Literature

Schmidt, K., Shelburne, W. A., & Vess, D. S. (2008). Approaches to selection, access, and collection development in the web world: a case study with fugitive literature. Library Resources & Technical Services, 52(3), 184-191.

In this highly fascinating article, the authors discuss the challenges of collection development from the Internet.  They address the application of existing skills and knowledge to collect materials from the Web, and in particular focused on the topic of hate literature.  Such fugitive literature, the authors state, “contains important manifestations of present day social and political history, art, and literature, and primary cultural output” (p. 184).  This topic had relevance to special collections already at the university where the authors work, and thus could be used to enhance these collections.  The central questions they wanted to answer were: how to locate this material; and how it might enrich an existing collection (either print or electronic).  The authors targeted Internet hate literature on websites that came from Illinois or surrounding Midwestern states (Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana).  An overwhelming number of sites were found, but eight websites/groups were eventually chosen for the study.  Some included the usual suspects such as Ku Klux Klan websites, or other white supremacist websites/groups, but some of the others were somewhat surprising, such as the Nation of Islam, Jewish Defense League, and the New Black Panthers.  The authors found that building a sustained collection of primary source materials from the web was very labor-intensive.  Various tools, programs, and webcrawlers were used, such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and Archive-It.  A number of lessons learned from their project were provided to those interested in this work, and the authors write that “a powerful symmetry exists between the process of developing print collections and that of developing digital collections from the Internet” (p. 189).  And that this work is very accessible to subject bibliographers and specialists in research libraries.  Lastly, the authors argue that it’s the duty of librarians to collect and preserve such digital material, as they our part of our cultural heritage, which librarians have done with other types of material.  Print items in current collections may have appeared to be fringe back when they were collected, but are considered to have rich research value today.  This article was very interesting because it explores the issues of collecting from the Web (and thus very relevant to librarians today), but equally interesting was the fact that they chose hate literature as the focus.  I highly recommend this article.