Filters and collection development

[Jim Campbell]

>In this debate, I still see confusion over whether the web
>consitutes a resource we select, or a medium to which
>we provide access in a telco-like way.  If we decide it
>is the latter, then we had better *not* filter, especially
>in light of court decisions such as the one in the Prodigy
>case.

This seems to me a false dichotomy. Surely the Web is both these
things.

As a selector of both printed material and of Internet resources, I am
aware that my library's budgetary and human resources do not allow me
to make all information equally available to our users. When I select
books, I try to choose those items that I think people will want to
find in our stacks. That may mean high use materials, it may mean books
that are used infrequently but intensely, it may mean titles in areas
that are of special interest to the University and which our and other
users expect to find here. When I make these selections, I am under no
illusion that I will meet 100% of our cutomers' needs. We have
document deliversy services and agreements with other libraries to make
some other types of information quickly available and of course we
participate in national and international interlibrary loan.

Internet resources are approached in much the same way. There are
several good dictionaries available free on the Internet.  Academic
libraries in Virginia have made a decision that access to the Oxford
English Dictionary is important enough that we will pay a license fee
and mount it on a server. At a second level, we have also made a
selection of other dictionaries we think we will be of special interest
to our users and linked them from our Web pages. Finally, many of us
provide public access computers for our users, advice on how to use the
various search engines and resource guides, and help in evaluating
Internet resources, so that the occasional user who needs a Chinese
dictionary of computing terms can find one.

Apologies for this deviation from the filtering discussion, but I am
anxious that we not confuse selection with filtering.  Selection is the
good old reader's advisor function carried out systematically rather
than face to face. Without a strong interlibary loan function,
selection can become a form of filtering and censorship when applied to
printed materials, but with the Internet we have a unique opportunity
to advise our readers without censoring them.

    -  Jim Campbell
    Acting Director, Systems and Networked Information

    University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA
    campbell at virginia.edu * Tel: 804-924-4985 * Fax: 804-924-1431