The Virtual Library

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Spring, 2002. In spite of a certain amount of disdain in academia for the amateurism of the internet, librarians and professors are increasingly aware that students use the internet for research. In fact, that many students are going to the internet and the internet only for their research, and that they, the professionals and gatekeepers for what is academically sound, had better get busy putting together lists of relatively reputable web sites to guide those students to sources that have at least minimal standards of accuracy.

For several years now, librarians at university libraries have been building "virtual collections," lists of links to internet sites that they consider good enough to recommend. Most major university libraries now have such lists on their web sites. Some of them are well-selected, well-maintained and well-organized, others are short, half-hearted, filled with dead links. Professors too have been putting together lists of links to internet sites they can recommend to their students, posting the lists on their web site syllabus pages. Some professors in my field, English literature, have created huge, authoritative lists of resources, like the well-known "Voice of the Shuttle." I've been creating lists of links to reputable literary criticism at literaryhistory.com since 1998, and in the process I've come to realize that lists like this are a new phenomena. They are in a way like bibliographies, and in another like collections of actual books in an actual library. But they are really something new, a virtual library.

When a scholar or librarian selectively collects web sites--rather than just listing every site they can find--the list becomes a screened collection. Such a list is created and maintained by a specialist, in the same way a traditional librarian collects physical books and journals. Just as a traditional librarian doesn't buy every book or journal that's published, a virtual librarian wouldn't index every web site on the internet. Because some web sites are just lists of dead or circular links, others just a place where someone typed out their favorite poem, others are so full of spelling and grammar mistakes that you can have no confidence in the writer. The ability to discriminate between worthy and unworthy work is part of what any librarian, traditional or virtual, brings to the job.

After creating the virtual collection, the virtual librarian will maintain it just as a regular librarian maintains a collection of physical books. Links often disappear or move, so they need to be regularly checked. A virtual librarian will probably selectively add to the collection, too, and gradually discard the oldest and least valuable links.

It's a new concept, the virtual librarian who maintains the virtual library, but it's an important service that librarians and scholars can provide in their fields of specialization. In English literature, scholars who would in the past have published print bibliographies on an author, period, or genre, could maintain a collection of links to actual articles and books that can be viewed on the internet. The internet bibliographies will be in effect libraries of articles and books selected by the bibliographer.

The task of cataloging free online literary criticism at present is not difficult, because there are not many scholarly articles on the internet yet. But as more articles appear, there will be a greater need for reliable, selective web bibliographies and web catalogs. At the same time, as good web cataloging gets underway, there will be more reason for academic journals to begin to publish directly to the web.

It's exciting to be involved in the emergence of the virtual library. Free online access to good analysis of works of literature will benefit scholars and students the world over, particularly those in poor and under-served countries. As teachers and writers we testify by our life's work to our belief in the power of knowledge and human understanding. The world-wide sharing of our intellectual treasures is a goal that is worthy of the support of all of us who consider ourselves educators.