The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000|
WWP
The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000 |
The WWP has not yet undertaken any formal evaluation of Women Writers Online, although in the future we may do so as part of a major upgrade effort. However, there are some indicators which may be of use in assessing the project's impact on teaching and research, and on the community of digital resources. The first of these is the response of institutions, in the level of interest they have shown in the collection. This can be most easily expressed in the number of subscribers we have gained in our first yearÑ160 institutionsÑwhich is considerably more than we had expected. A predominance of these (XX percent) are multi-year subscriptions, indicating a high level of confidence and satisfaction at the outset; the number would be higher except that many of our subscribers are state institutions which are barred from entering into multi-year licenses. A second indicator is the response of users, which has also been very positive, as evidenced by email comments we receive and feedback from librarians. Finally, published reviews of WWO have been quite encouraging as well.
We have not conducted a formal study of patterns of scholarly research in women's writing, and thus any observations about the increase in articles and scholarly attention to texts in the WWP collection must remain anecdotal for the time being. Conclusions about causality will probably always be conjectural as well. However, during the time the WWP has been at work, first distributing printed texts and now providing online access, there has certainly been a strong upsurge in interest in early women's writing. Where in the 1980s, Victorian women's texts were the center of scholarly attention, during the 1990s greater interest has been paid to 18th-century and Renaissance materials, with an efflorescence of specialized conferences on topics in early women's writing. There has also been a considerable increase in the number of print editions of women's texts, confirming our early prediction that access to archives of primary sources would encourage the production of scholarly editions.
When the WWP was founded in the late 1980s, studying early women's writing at all was still something of a rarity, requiring explanation and defense; teaching it involved either establishing an entirely new course, or somehow shoehorning additional texts into already crowded syllabi. Given that these difficulties existed even in the USA and Britain--countries for whom these texts constituted an important part of cultural history--and given that resistance to women's writing was so strong even in the academy, where intellectual curiosity might be thought highest, our expectation was that the audience outside the academy in the US and Britain would be small to the point of insignificance. Our working assumption was that our subscribers would be drawn from large research institutions, and that the collection would be regarded as a somewhat arcane niche product. We also assumed that for practical reasons, the audience might be further limited by the need for network access, making it difficult for people from smaller schools to use the collection.
Intellectual changes since then have worked in our favor, as have technological developments. Women's writing has grown immensely in stature within the academy, and this--perhaps combined with the fact that a predominance of acquisition librarians are female--has helped us argue successfully for the importance of a collection like WWO. In addition, the advent and immense spread of the World Wide Web has enabled us to reach a very broad subscribership that spans the range of research institutions, liberal arts colleges, state universities, and even small community colleges, all of whom are now wired. We have also begun to reach an audience outside the US and Britain, with subscribers or trials in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Israel. We now feel that we could also cultivate an audience within high schools and public libraries, which have lately begun to show an interest.
In short, the Web has proven a friendly environment for us, and may prove more so with time. The inquisitiveness it fosters, and its ability to aggregate far-flung communities of users with common interests, both work to the advantage of specialized collections like ours.