The mandate of any National Library, including Canada’s, is to preserve that country’s published heritage. Most recently, this has come to include electronically published materials. This issue came to the forefront during the early 1990s as more and more material was being published in various electronic formats: CDs, FTP sites, Web sites, etc. To preserve this material meant not just linking to various sites or acknowledging their existence but actually obtaining and keeping copies of these materials. The database of these full text resources is the currently existing Electronic Collection at the National Library of Canada (NLC) <http://collection.nlc‐bnc.ca>.
The project began as the Electronic Publications Pilot Project (EPPP) in 1994. Its mandate was “to acquire, store, preserve, catalogue and provide access and service for a small number of existing Canadian on‐line electronic journals and other representative publications available on the Internet”. The pilot project defined what was and was not an electronic publication and made several recommendations on issues such as copyright, selection of material and long term preservation. Most of these recommendations have evolved into a comprehensive collection policy for the Electronic Collection. Since the end of the pilot project in 1996, the contents of the Electronic Collection have continued to grow significantly.
The nature of the subject areas covered in this resource is probably the most difficult concept to grasp. Mainly, the collection is comprised of online books and journals from a vast array of publishers on several different subject areas. Just browsing through the alphabetical title list shows sources covering history, politics, labour studies, agriculture, and geography, to name a few. Due to this vast quantity of subject matter, it is very difficult to determine the quality of the material included. Basically the criteria for inclusion is that it is Canadiana and it is electronic. After that, the sky’s the limit. A very detailed Networked Electronic Publications Policy and Guidelines document is viewable from the Electronic Collections site. This document not only describes the selection policy but also the access and preservation policies.
Searching the NLC’s Electronic Collection is quite basic and user friendly. Title, subject, and full text searches are available. Title searching is further subdivided into All Titles, Serial Titles and Monographic Titles. There is also a browsable A‐Z list. The title by keyword(s) search allows up to a maximum of four keywords with full Boolean capability. The Subject List is organized by Dewey Decimal Classification with links provided under each heading. Subject keyword is only provided via resAnet, the free Web‐based interface to the NLC’s catalogue. The only difficulty with this is that only brief records are viewable in resAnet, not necessarily giving the user enough information on the source. While full keyword and Boolean capabilities are available in resAnet, users must realize that they are no longer just searching the Electronic Collection but the entire holdings of the NLC. This has potential to be highly confusing to some. The Full text search in Electronic Collection checks for keywords in the text of electronic publications archived in ASCII, HTML, text, MS Word and WordPerfect. The search screen for full text varies from the title options; I would recommend reading through the Search Tips screen before attempting a search. Full Boolean, proximity and phrase searching are available in the full text search. French Boolean terms (et, ou) are also used for searching.
Presentation of results is also easy to interpret. The total number of documents retrieved is presented at the top of the screen. If a full text search had been completed, entries are arranged in ranked order from highest to lowest score. The title, document URL, and size are given for each entry. One major problem from these results lists seems to be a large number of incorrect or inactive links. A link checking program, run regularly, would alleviate most of these problems. Another situation that commonly occurred during testing was that many of these documents are restricted to the NLC’s onsite clients and staff (due to licensing restrictions). This is clearly pointed out in the title link. However, this could prove very irritating to some external users. Due to the varied presentations of material (ASCII, HTML, text, etc.), there is a link provided to Adobe Acrobat, RealAudio and Ghostview to be used as necessary for those documents freely accessible. The final items’ appearance varies to such an extent that it is very difficult to comment on the quality of each presentation.
Overall, this product has several very useful features that will come into play as the actual content of the collection grows. Access to Canadian materials of any sort is developing into an international need, and this is definitely a preferred mode of access. In a few years, I predict the use of this resource, as well as those similar to it, will escalate dramatically.
