The need to support the purchase of both print and electronic resources strains the Libraries' acquisitions budget. I Members Linda Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of History, began the comments from the first panel. She emphasized the centrality of the process of creation of a physical document as the outcome of research and the centrality of access to that object for research and study. Pedagogical trends now also emphasize access to primary sources for undergraduates and well as graduate students. Support for physical access needs to be expanded and electronic access can't substitute for direct access to primary sources very soon if ever.
Books are the outcome of a process that goes beyond research as an act of imparting information.
Speed of dissemination is not the only, or even primary, goal of humanities research. Electronic communication does not necessarily enhance the process of selection and vetting of ideas that may be the most essential part of the scholarly communication process. William Welburn, Assistant Dean, Graduate College, suggested that another form of scholarly communication, the dissertation, does have the potential to be greatly enhanced by electronic production and distribution. Not only do electronic formats allow new forms of expression for ideas, through representation of multimedia and dimensionality, but the increased visibility of dissertations online might result in increasingly high quality for these research products. The inclusion of this critically important form of initial scholarship into the primary cycle of communication with mature scholars could lessen the intellectual isolation of this format, increase access to new research for information poor countries, and promote acquisition of skills in expression of scholarly argument.