Periodical Studies and Access: A Research Society for American Periodicals Forum: Introduction
- Periodical Studies and Access: A Research Society for American Periodicals ForumIntroduction
At the 2006 American Literature Association conference in San Francisco, the Research Society for American Periodicals sponsored a roundtable discussion on the issue of "Periodicals and Access." Organized in large part as a response to the increasing digitization of periodicals, the session asked panelists and audience members alike to consider a wide range of questions: To what extent do scholars and teachers have adequate access to periodicals? How have financial difficulties in higher education affected access? What challenges and opportunities in both teaching and research do digitized resources create?
Although it is not uncommon to hear unqualified enthusiasm for the supposed universal access created by digitization, the panelists and audience members at the RSAP session expressed more measured responses. On the one hand, many people acknowledged the sheer delight in seeing images from previously inaccessible periodicals and searching large databases in ways previously unimaginable. On the other hand, however, many expressed concerns as well: the inability of many libraries to afford electronic access (and the resulting division between the "haves" and the "have-nots"), the decided preference for searching rather than browsing page by page, the lack of adequate discussion about the relationship between digitization and canon formation, the inadequacies of many digitized texts (that often omit advertisements, for example, or fail to provide original pagination), and, [End Page 114] often poignantly, the need to see periodicals in their original form—crumbling paper and all.
While the viewpoints were as varied as the experiences of individual teachers and scholars, one thing seems certain: this is both an exciting and challenging time to be working in periodicals, especially as digitization becomes a corporate—rather than a purely scholarly—endeavor. While we have much to gain from such corporate projects, we surely must find new ways of collaborating with librarians, teachers, scholars, and business leaders if we are to influence the availability and form of both our primary and secondary sources.
President elect of RSAP, Patricia Okker is Professor and Chair of the English department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Author of Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century Women Editors (University of Georgia Press, 1995) and Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Virginia Press, 2003), she is currently editing a collection of essays on serial fiction published in minority periodicals.
