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Winter 2000, No. 89
Collection Development Interest Group Focuses on the Scholarly Web Site
Jonas Barciauskas
Boston College
The CDIG held its fall program on December 2 at Northeastern University. The topic was, "The Scholarly Web Site: Two Prominent Projects and Their Implications for Collection Development." Presenters were Gregory Crane, Professor of Classics at Tufts University and Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/), Katherine Gill, Associate Professor of Theology at Boston College and Co-editor of Matrix: A Collection of Resources for the Study of Women's Religious Communities, 500-1500 (http://matrix.bc.edu/), and Jill Thomas, Digital Resources Cataloger at O'Neill Library, Boston College. Greg Crane described Perseus, a digital library of resources for the study of the ancient world. According to Crane, Perseus has made scholarship easier and greatly increased the ease of accessing material, while exploring technological issues relevant to future humanities Web sites. He is now in the process of constructing a site focusing on the history of London.
Katherine Gill spoke about various phases in developing Matrix, a web site devoted to women's medieval religious communities. During its development at Yale, the project team consisted of Gill, a librarian, and a programmer. Both Crane and Gill agreed that librarian assistance, especially bibliographer expertise in identifying materials for the sites, was invaluable. Like Perseus, Matrix gathers often hard-to-find materials and makes them more easily accessible.
Jill Thomas, Digital Resources Cataloger at Boston College, described her work in cataloging e-journals and e-resources. She regarded the task of cataloging scholarly Web sites as a necessary albeit challenging one because of the depth of materials such sites contain. All three presentations illustrated the complexity of the problems facing faculty and librarians as they help create new forms of research resources. The scholarly Web site is an emerging type of resource that will require new kinds of collaborative efforts between bibliographers, catalogers, and faculty.
A lively question and answer period following the presentations allowed members of the audience to get further details about the two projects. Thirty people attended.