Literary studies are all over the net. A Google search on the term yields several million results, and combining "literary studies" with "online," "digital," or "web" still keeps the count in the hundreds of thousands. Closer examination reveals that many of these sites are library-based and point to primary texts, items digitized from special collections, and digital archives directed by faculty through initiatives, centers, and services that often have a library component. Syllabi and other materials are also widely available, and the blogosphere bristles with literary studies discussions. Data repositories and open-access journals relevant to literary studies are appearing by the dozen. Still more material is available for fee online, and is often purchased by university libraries or their consortia — publishers began in the late 1980s to sell massive full-text databases of materials germane to literary studies, and this trend continues today.
And yet, after fifteen years of digital library production and enormous purchasing of commercial content, there is still little sign of literary disciplines and departments being transformed by new modes of inquiry, new publishing opportunities, or new textual editing paradigms. There are individuals who stand out as landmark adopters of digital content and related technologies, but — as several of the pioneers in the field have observed in recent years (McGann 2004; Ayers and Grisham 2003) — there has not yet been a change in the discipline or its scholarly communications to the degree we are seeing in science, technology, medicine, and business.
As this chapter will demonstrate, libraries can provide literary scholars and students with collections that are increasingly a rich and complex hybrid of analog and digital resources, and librarians can function as willing allies in the exploration of new teaching techniques, research collaborations, analytical tools, and scholarly communications channels.
Literary studies in the virtual library can be found through a local library catalog, an online bibliography or aggregation service (in the case of journal articles in particular), and the usual web-searching tools. In the case of a search of the entire web, the sheer volume of material can make discovery difficult for a popular and populous topic such as English literature; much easier, say, for "classical Japanese literature" where there are rich online holdings in the original language and in translation, but where there is a better chance of Google having the most relevant items in the top twenty returns. A web search, of course, is likely to miss many of the commercially published resources that libraries license, and even some of the freely available material (especially for webpages that are generated dynamically from a database, as many are).
No definitive single guide to literary studies online exists, but various collecting points list rich subsets according to their collecting criteria, including the Western European Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (<http://www.dartmouth.edu/-wessweb/>); the University of Pennsylvania Library's Online Books Page (<http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>); the Voice of the Shuttle (<http://vos.ucsb.edu/>); OAIster (<http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/>), and — on a smaller scale — the emerging Digital Library Federation's Collections Registry (<http://dlf.grainger.uiuc.edu/DLFCollectionsRegistry/browse/>). Disciplinary gateways cover topic areas such as Irish Resources in the Humanities (<http://irith.org/>) or the broader Humbul Humanities Hub (<http://www.humbul.ac.uk/>). Sometimes it is also possible to find environmental scans that provide high-level analytical guides to a disciplinary area: a good recent example is A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature by Martha L. Brogan (<http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlf104/>). Its purpose is twofold: to offer a sampling of the types of digital resources currently available in support of American literature, and to identify the prevailing concerns of specialists in the field as expressed during interviews conducted between July 2004 and May 2005. The report also classifies the major types of resource one is likely to find online for literary studies:
(1) quality-controlled subject gateways, (2) author studies, (3) public domain e-book collections and alternative publishing models, (4) proprietary reference resources and full-text primary source collections, (5) collections by design, and (6) teaching applications.
(p. 1)
There are still too few places where such resources get promoted, reviewed, and critiqued, although some online journals are getting better at featuring them, such as D-Lib magazine (<http://www.dlib.org/>).
Libraries are purchasing electronic texts, collections of digital images, and now digital audio and video titles in ever-increasing numbers, either to load on local servers for use with software provided by the library, or — more usually — by subscription to a web service produced by the publisher of the material. The holdings of primary materials in digital form for literary studies are impressive indeed; for example, three recent undertakings are providing access to several hundred thousand early American and English books:
1. Archive of Americana (including Evans Early American Imprints Collection): 100,000 titles, from seventeenth and eighteenth century America. NewsBank/ Readex Co. <http://www.readex.com/readex/index.cfm content 93>.
2. Early English Books Online: Most of the 125,000 titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475–1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641–1700). ProQuest Information & Learning. <http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home>.
3. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO): 150,000 titles. Thomson-Gale. <http://www.gale.com/EighteenthCentury/>.
One common feature of collections such as these is less than ideal for some types of literary inquiry: the texts are often digital images of the pages of the books, with the searchable text that lies behind them created by machine recognition (optical character recognition, or OCR) and left uncorrected. This limits the user's ability to perform searches across the corpus that yield reliable results, and complicates machine-aided textual analysis. When the page images are digitally photographed in black and white (rather than utilizing color or grayscale imaging) there is the additional problem that book features such as illustrations can be difficult to decipher, as they require a tonal variation that is absent in a binary black or white digital rendition. Other online versions of multi-volume printed collections such as Harper's Weekly (1862–1912) or ProQuest's Literature Online, which gives access to huge amounts of British and American poetry, prose, and drama (350,000 works, plus supporting material), are accurately keyboarded and encoded, fully supporting machine-aided literary analysis. The publishers' willingness to undertake such expensive and ambitious projects bodes well for future such endeavors, assuming that use and improved scholarly output justifies the continuing production and purchase of this type of expensive publication.
University, college, and even some school libraries who can subscribe to these collections are likely to have in digital form many books that they will never have in print, and library subscriptions also bring many online versions of leading journals to the desktop. So prevalent are electronic journals in other disciplines, especially science, technology, and medicine (STM), that it is impossible to imagine them functioning without electronic access to most scholarly communication relevant to their daily work. It is not clear that we are close to a similar situation in literary studies, although the economic impact on the humanities of STM online journals and their frequent price rises is evident: libraries are spending more and more on electronic STM journals and less and less on the traditional scholarly monograph that is the backbone of the humanistic disciplines. Consequently, university and other academic presses are publishing fewer book-length studies in print, and literary scholars are having real problems finding a publisher for a book that would have been relatively easily published a decade ago. As much as any other force, the need to publish a book for scholarly communication and for professional advancement combined with the paucity of presses willing to publish in the traditional manner may compel the humanities to move to the wholesale adoption of electronic publishing. There are signs that certain university presses are readying themselves for this eventuality: The University Press of Virginia, for example, has a Digital Rotunda imprint, producing works of scholarly editing, and Rice University has just resurrected its press as an electronic-only publisher.
We are seeing a steady increase in libraries digitizing their own materials, which are often of particular relevance to literary studies. Many of these items are available freely on the web and often concentrate on rare books and unique manuscripts, including author or theme-centered collections. In some notable cases, these collections are built by librarians who are driven by their own sense of the worth of the material and a desire to make it more accessible to facilitate better pedagogy and scholarship. Many excellent online archives are also being compiled and annotated by scholars around an author or a topic. This is a rich area of scholarly engagement and often of productive partnerships with librarians. The motivations for these sites are various:
• access to rare materials in the classroom;
• combinations of print and manuscript materials;
• research with new digital tools;
• collaborative work with teams at other institutions;
• virtual collections that bring together in one place digital versions of physical objects that will remain geographically dispersed;
• and new forms of textual scholarship and enquiry.
These sites can change the way the scholar teaches, researches, or thinks about his or her discipline; they can be widely used resources in the work of others; and they can reach out to very large international and general public audiences who rarely benefit from the scholarly and pedagogical expertise of subject experts. The final chapter in this Companion, 'Annotated Overview of Selected Electronic Resources,' gives a flavor of some of the extraordinary scholar-driven sites available for literary studies, resources of distributed material built by distributed teams (such as The Blake Archive), emerging online scholarly journals (Southern Spaces), and the ambitious experiments in scholarly communications that are under way for the discipline, most notably Jerome McGann's NINES:
[NINES is] a project to found a publishing environment for aggregated, peer-reviewed online scholarship centered in nineteenth-century studies, British and American. NINES was created as a way for excellent work in digital scholarship to be produced, vetted, published, and recognized by the discipline.
(<http://www.nines.org/>)
Still others exist not in literary studies but in closely allied disciplines such as history, and provide good examples of what can be done in the humanities more generally — excellent examples include The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (<http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/>) and The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive (<http://www.salemwitchtrials.org/>). One thing that they all have in common is a close connection with their libraries, not just as a source of material to digitize, but as a source of expertise, sometimes of project management space, and even of funding. Certain funding sources are available to literary scholars when in partnership with a library or museum, such as the US Federal funding agency the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) (<http://www.imls.gov/>). The recently announced grants given jointly by the IMLS and the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) indicate that the granting community wants to foster more collaboration between the scholarly and library communities (<http://www.neh.gov/>).
In recent years, we have seen a general acceleration in the ambitions of publishers, not-for-profit consortiums, federal agencies, and commercial internet companies to create digital content on larger and larger scale. While not focused on literary studies, these real and planned undertakings will have a transformational impact on the materials available for the study of literature. One of the early signs of this willingness to think in massive terms in the US was the proposal for a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT), a multi-billion dollar "digital gift to the nation" as a transformational federal investment:
The Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (or "DO IT") would be financed by billions of dollars in revenue from auctions of unused, publicly-owned telecommunications spectrum, as mandated by Congress. Funded by five major national foundations, the project proposes to do for education in the U.S. what the National Science Foundation does for science, the National Institutes of Health do for health, and DARPA does for defense. DO ITwould enable the nation's schools, universities, libraries and museums to reach outside their walls to millions of people in the U.S. and throughout the world. (<http://www.digitalpromise.org/>)
Whatever finally happens with these ongoing and ambitious plans, the arrival on the scene of DO IT in 2001 spurred librarians and others to think about what we would do in the face of a massive investment in digital content, tools, evaluation, and learning systems. One could also point to ongoing projects such as Carnegie Mellon's Million Books Project (<http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html>) as examples of this willingness to digitize large amounts of content, or the new Open Content Alliance championed by the Internet Archive and finding some support in North American university libraries (<http://www.opencontentalliance.org/>).
Currently looming over all of these projects, however, is Google Book Search (<http://books.google.com/>), the ongoing massive digital production that Google is undertaking in partnership with publishers and with the university libraries of Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Michigan, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, the University Complutense of Madrid, the University of California, and The New York Public Library. These plans call for the digitizing of millions of volumes across these libraries, and the aim is to make Google a search tool not only for online materials but for printed books too. Google Book Search is a discovery tool that searches the content of books, but once an item is found its aim is to connect users to the physical book itself — either via a publisher or bookseller, or by referring one to a local library where the book can be borrowed or read. It is not at present a "virtual library service" as we typically think of one, although out-of-copyright texts can be viewed in their entirety online. But the service is of great value as a discovery tool for books that are in copyright, even if one cannot make use of that content online.
The latter point highlights an issue for literary studies that has hitherto gone unaddressed here — the virtual library for literary studies is relatively well-stocked with material published up to the 1920s, and many commercial offerings focus on this material too, although in the area of literary studies Alexander Street Press in particular has shown a strong willingness to create products relevant to literary studies in theater, song, women writers, African-American or Latino fiction that contain much licensed content from the twentieth century. Innovative publishers notwithstanding, scholars of twentieth-century literature have less opportunity to engage with the virtual library than their colleagues studying writers of earlier periods. (See Van Hulle, Chapter 7, Hypertext and Avant-texte in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Literature, in this volume.)
Many literary scholars and the libraries that serve them have ambitions to create digital archives of twentieth-century materials. If the publisher is extant, there is someone to contact for permission — say, for the non-commercial use of that book on a public website — and there are good indications of some success in this type of request, as Denise Troll-Covey's work at Carnegie Mellon University on the Million Books Project has recorded. But what to do if something is in copyright but the owner cannot be found? The item is of great intellectual and pedagogical value but it is long out of print and the publisher no longer exists. In the absence of no discoverable press or author, the response too often is to do nothing, but in the US at least, there are public policy trends that give us some hope that the "permissions problem" may be on its way to being solved. The proposed Orphan Works legislation under investigation by the US Copyright Office has great prospects for literary scholars of twentieth-century materials by providing us a legal process through which to seek permission and the ability to proceed (with new legal safeguards in place) if no owner can be discovered from whom permission can be sought. There is an opportunity and arguably a necessity for humanists to have a voice in legislation and issues that are central to literary studies, such as this Report on Orphan Works (U.S. Copyright Office. 2006 <http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/>) or 2005's "Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals" edited by Donald J. Waters (<http://www.diglib.org/pubs/waters051015.htm>). The American Council of Learned Societies has taken up this opportunity in Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences 2006 (<http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/>), echoing the hugely influential Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (Washington, DC 2003) (<http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/>).
As our familiarity with the use of digital content grows, so too does our realization that we can do more with this material than search it and browse it. There are a growing number of software tools that allow for the sort of scholarly behaviors that are natural to us in the print world: gathering up copies of things, annotating them, and arranging them into personal libraries (virtual filing cabinets). We are seeing the emergence of personal library organization and publishing tools (Greenstone from the University of Waikato, New Zealand <http://www.greenstone.org/>) and The Scholar's Box from UC Berkeley's Interactive University Project <http://scholarsbox.net>; multimedia annotation tools (MediaMatrix, from Michigan State University <http://matrix.msu.edu/-mmatrix/>); geographic information systems (Google Earth <http://earth.google.com/>); data visualization software (Grokker <http://www.grokker.com/>); and many more. The library tends to keep up with such developments and is a natural and willing partner with the humanities departments as they explore the possibilities such tools have for data mining and the display of results. Add to these software packages the blogs, wikis, and virtual communities that are being adopted, the digital tools for collaborative scholarship, for innovative ways of interrogating text, and for new teaching possibilities, and it is not difficult to see increasing potential for transformative change in the way that literary scholars research, publish, and teach.
For scientists, the laboratory represents a major hub of scholarly activity. In the laboratory, scientists acquire, gather, combine, analyze, and process data that allows them to test hypotheses and construct new lines of inquiry. These data and findings are subsequently used as the foundation for scholarly communication, most often in the form of journal articles. The laboratory can range from the entire universe to more controlled settings such as a chemistry laboratory to simulated environments that exist only within a computer.
While the modes of scholarship and dissemination differ between humanists and scientists, it is useful to consider how a similar concept might apply for humanists —with the library as one form of laboratory. The library can provide a welcome space in which to innovate and experiment, and its subject librarians, digital specialists, catalogers, and programmers can all be valuable allies in exploring new forms of publication, production, and dissemination. Most library patrons can recall moments of exploration, serendipitous discovery, and purposeful construction of new ideas regarding research while browsing and reading within the stacks. In the physical environment, such exploration and discovery is "constrained" by realities of space and resources. How much does such exploration change in the digital environment? The emergence of "mashups," which reflect one of the unique capabilities of the digital environment, provides an interesting example of combining digital content and services without physical constraints. Craigslist.com represents a well-known classifieds service and Google Maps offers a visual interface for information presentation. A mashup of the two resulted in a visually based service for housing (<http://www.housingmaps.com/>). Will humanists begin to "mashup" scholarly content and services across a distributed network? On the other hand, the physical library provides a sense of context that is difficult to emulate in the digital environment. Will it be important to maintain context and, if so, how will this be managed in digital literary studies?
Scientists and engineers often believe that their disciplines are "data rich" whereas the humanities are "data poor." However, even a casual examination of primary materials such as manuscripts will reveal that the humanities are rich with content that is difficult to extract into digital form. At Johns Hopkins, the Sheridan Libraries are conducting research into automated transcription from medieval manuscripts. Even before such a capability can be considered, the research team concluded that it is essential to digitally "straighten" the lines from the manuscripts. This realization demonstrates some of the difficulty in extracting "data" from humanities content. At the most recent Document Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL) conferences, there has been an increasing awareness of the difficult image recognition challenges for the Computer Science community as they consider digital humanities content.
Additionally, if one considers the scale of the entire printed record and newer forms of media such as television programs or movies, it becomes clear that humanists have voluminous quantity of data, which remain untapped for deep exploration or examination because the infrastructure and services to use them effectively in digital form remain in nascent form. As initiatives such as the Open Content Alliance and Google Book Search gain momentum, the amount of digital content that becomes available will increase exponentially. The challenge for libraries lies in the realm of building infrastructure and services to support large datasets such that humanists might work in the laboratory of the digital library.
Humanists are not accustomed to imagining medieval manuscripts as "data" but interesting developments from the Roman de la Rose Project (<http://rose.mse.jhu.edu>) led by Johns Hopkins University lend evidence to the idea that digital manuscripts should not be viewed as surrogates but rather as a new form of data to be examined, analyzed, and processed in new ways. In particular, the lead scholar for this project, Stephen G. Nichols, has asserted that working in the digital environment allows medievalists to "break free" of the constraints of traditional literary studies. For example, Lecoy's line-numbering scheme has been used as a canonical method for comparisons between Roman de la Rose manuscripts. Nichols is developing a scene-based methodology that does not rely on "lines" but rather upon semantic information for comparison. The Library is playing a key role in "mapping" this scene-based protocol into a technology framework that will support new forms of searching and comparison.
Greg Crane, the Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Digital Library, has raised thought-provoking ideas related to the theme of "What Do You Do with a Million Books?" With the growing array of tools, it becomes increasingly likely that humanists will look upon collections and content as sources of data to be analyzed, queried, re-purposed, shared, disseminated, and preserved. These and several other projects offer an unusual view for humanists, but one that strikes a chord with some scientists. Alex Szalay of the US National Virtual Observatory has stated that with large-scale, digital astronomy, "data are fuzzy and answers are approximate." For the Virtual Observatory, tools to navigate this fuzzy space and issues such as provenance, annotation, and preservation — which have long interested humanists — have become of paramount importance.
Libraries can play an integral role in supporting both scientists and humanists with data-driven scholarship by digitizing collections and by developing appropriate infrastructure (both human and technological) and services to support new modes of inquiry. At the heart of the digital library that can support this type of digital scholarship lies the concept of a repository.
Libraries have been the eventual home of scholars' archives, and the place that safeguards the published scholarly record over time. Increasingly, the rise of the institutional repository extends this role to digital content and to a wider variety of material. Whether as a service built on top of a repository or as a separate endeavor, the virtual library is often also a publishing space, partnering with faculty and departments to launch electronic journals, host faculty-driven collections and disseminate scholarship around a theme or an author.
In the physical environment, the library represents a repository of content, with associated services and infrastructure to support the collections. This concept translates into the digital environment with some important distinctions. In the digital realm, the previously distinct elements of collections, services, and infrastructure have become blurred. Robin Chandler of the California Digital Library has indicated that the Open Content Alliance views digital content as infrastructure. OCA intends to build a repository of content as a foundation for services and tools that will augment the capability of the digital collections to support scholarship. The aforementioned Virtual Observatory is a good example of how collections and services work together seamlessly. Digital astronomers acquire data with an explicit consideration of what services can be applied to these data and build services with an a priori understanding of applications for existing data.
As digital capabilities grow, the roles of scholars, libraries, and publishers have also become more fluid. Roles that were distinct and separable in the past are open to renegotiation in the digital age, providing opportunities to strengthen existing partnerships and to form new collaborative efforts — both Cornell University (<http://cip.cornell.edu/webdocs/>) and Rice University (<http://cnx.org/>) have launched new electronic publishing initiatives with strong involvement from their libraries. Cornell's initiative emphasizes cost-effective, customized options for specific communities or user needs. Rice's all-digital effort extends their repository-based technology infrastructure, Connexions, which is already used for e-learning applications, into the e-publishing domain. The Sheridan Libraries at The Johns Hopkins University continue to collaborate with Project Muse and other electronic publishing initiatives; the aforementioned Perseus Digital Library could be considered a novel form of publication produced directly by scholars. Each of these approaches provides interesting models to consider for digital publishing, either through open access or fee-based approaches.
These new models raise important questions regarding roles and division of labor for libraries and publishers, and for modes of scholarly communication for humanists. With print-based scholarship and publishing, the roles of library and publisher evolved over time into familiar relationships, which may be re-examined for digital scholarship. As for literary studies, the "traditional" form of publishing — the monograph — influenced the way in which research has been conducted and conveyed. With new avenues for publishing, it is possible, even probable, that humanists will begin to explore new forms of research and dissemination. As an example, if humanists begin to embrace the concept of data-driven scholarship, the traditional monograph does not easily support direct connections to digital data. The "fixed" presentation format, however, lends itself to a certain stability and line of thought. How humanists emphasize these attributes — and how academic reward structures change — will affect digital publishing and the roles of libraries and publishers.
This dynamic nature of digital scholarship also raises significant implications for the development of digital libraries. The repository forms the foundation of digital libraries that comprise collections, services, and infrastructure to support learning, research, dissemination, and preservation. In many discussions regarding the repository, it is often described in terms of the form of particular software, content types, discipline, or institution. While each of these lenses is useful, perhaps the most important aspect of repositories relates to the support of services. In an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) report, Clifford Lynch offered the following definition: "a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members" (<http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html>). This definition is compelling precisely because it avoids discussions of specific technology or organizational schemes, and emphasizes the provision of services, which will undoubtedly change over time (and therefore the repository systems will also evolve).
Access-related services such as search or metadata harvesting often attract greater attention, perhaps because of the direct impact on scholars. Metadata harvesting efforts such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allow discovery of a vast array of materials within repositories that might otherwise remain undiscovered or untapped for literary studies. Both individually customized search interfaces for particular collections and wide-scale, federated searches across distributed repositories facilitate greater discovery. Such discovery is undeniably important for scholarship, but without a commitment to long-term curation of digital content, there is a risk that digital scholarship will become unpredictable or even unreliable.
In this context, it is worth considering that one of the most important adjectives to describe repositories is persistent. Digital preservation is an essential service that has received relatively little attention until recently, despite concerns over long-term persistence of digital materials over a decade ago. Most recently, the call for "urgent action" to preserve electronic scholarly journals has garnered some notable interest and activity, but it is worth mentioning that electronic journals are the proverbial tip of the iceberg in the important realm of digital preservation. Given that libraries, archives, and museums are charged with recording and preserving cultural heritage, it is important for these memory institutions to embrace the responsibility of digital preservation.
Librarians often mention that preservation is long-term access. However, with physical items, there is an undeniable tradeoff in the sense that when an item is being preserved, it remains temporarily inaccessible. This tradeoff need not be realized in the digital environment. As digital objects are ingested and managed within repositories to begin the process of digital preservation, parallel pipelines can process these objects to support direct access or transfer into learning environments and publishing systems. While this opportunity offered through repository-based infrastructure bolsters the opportunity for digital preservation, it is essential to consider explicitly such needs from the inception of the digital object life-cycle. Digital collections and services that support literary studies need to be created with an understanding that creation of the object represents the first step in a long-term commitment. Preservation "after the fact" raises significant difficulties that are much more easily addressed at the point of creation. As an example, technologists can use a machine-generated number ("checksum") to validate a digital image. If this checksum is not calculated at the point of creation, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to determine if a particular digital image has been compromised.
The relatively familiar, stable, library settings to support physical collections evolved over centuries. The models for libraries in the digital age have only begun to be formed. There is little doubt that in future scholars will access new forms of content and services that are unimaginable today. By creating repositories as part of an overall digital architecture that preserves digital content without requiring it to be fixed into a rigid format, libraries offer the pathway toward long-term access in a variety of contexts. Rather than assume or predict scholarly needs, libraries can use repositories as the foundation for frameworks that will facilitate use of digital content in multiple settings, within multiple applications, and through various interfaces.
With a degree of flexibility, and an ongoing commitment to focus on scholarly needs, digital libraries based on repositories will continue to ensure that the library remains a hub of scholarly activity.
In all of this discussion of virtual collections and tools that are accessible wherever you are, it is important to remind ourselves of the enduring role of the library as a physical place in the life of the literary scholar. The library buildings with their collections and related services are central to the working life of the literary scholar, whose engagement with material not yet digitized and with the physical book and literary manuscript as an object of study is greater than in many other disciplines. Inescapably, however, the research collection is increasingly a hybrid of physical and electronic sources, with more and more contemporary journal literature available through electronic publication only. For convenience, for utility, and for the myriad teaching and research possibilities that the combination of digital content and the computer-aided analysis and dissemination affords, the digital library is moving slowly to the center of literary scholarship just as it has — much more rapidly and with greater initial transformational effect — in many of the sciences.
The virtual library is a tale of mass and malleability, and much of the turmoil and opportunity of the present decade in the digital library centers around these twin themes (or their lack). Current copyright restrictions and the inability even to buy access to digital versions of many books, journals, and manuscripts central to literary studies all hamper our deep and daily immersion into the digital library in the manner we are used to doing with the print library. This is changing, as dramatic increases in digitized content from local initiatives, from commercial publishers, and from Google's planned digitizing of entire academic libraries takes us closer to the point where most of what we want to use is available in digital form (although not necessarily without fee).
There is a growing realization that in order to encourage the innovative uses we as librarians want to enable in our users, we need electronic content that is not simply available on a website but which encourages innovation by being easily gathered, personalized, re-purposed, and delivered out again to an audience. This malleability goes to the heart of much scholarly endeavor — gather, annotate, analyze, and re-publish are the so-called "scholarly primitive behaviors" that characterize our work (Unsworth 2000) — and in partnership with their libraries we can look forward to literary scholars increasingly realizing the power of the virtual library in the coming years.
Ayers, Edward L., and Charles M. Grisham (2003). "Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Hoped (Yet)." EDUCAUSE Review 38:6 (November/December): 40–51. <http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm03/erm0361.asp>.
McGann, Jerome (2004). "A Note on the Current State of Humanities Scholarship." Critical Inquiry 30:2 (Winter). <http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v30/30n2.McGann.html>.
Unsworth, John (2000). "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?" Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice. A symposium sponsored by King's College, London, May 13, 2000. <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/-jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html>.