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.
