University of Virginia Library

Conclusion

The above discussion has attempted to point out that documentary editors may be coming to an important juncture in their work. As on-line national library and archival data bases become a reality, editors will have to assess the role, if any, they will play in these networks. If editors and the agencies and foundations that fund them decide that a part of the goal of making editions accessible to the public will be the ability to do on-line searching of documents published in documentary editions, then editorial

projects will have to start thinking now about using the same standards archivists employ. Certainly it seems a waste of energy for any project controlling its documents with the use of a data base management system to ignore the archival standards which could open the data base to a wide audience.

Yet documentary editors must be prepared to put a great deal of effort into adopting archival standards. AACR2 and the MARC AMC format must be mastered and incorporated into the project at the cost of increased complexity and, consequently, more time required to finish the project. That cost may presently not be worth it for editors, at least until expert programs have been written to ease the use of AACR2 and MARC AMC. Authority work for names and subjects poses further hindrances. Projects would have to add the search for authorized name forms onto their already burdened work load. For subjects, editors will have no other choice but to use the Library of Congress's Subject Headings and to stumble along with often inappropriate headings. Nevertheless, editors can take comfort in that archivists will face many of the same problems. Out of those problems will grow new solutions in microcomputer software and on-line data base utilities. An argument thus can be made for editors waiting and letting archivists shoulder the burden of developing approaches to on-line access.

Waiting may be a mistake, however, since archivists and editors, though having much in common, have differing goals. Any national data base of manuscript holdings will probably not include the type of document-by-document description editions offer. Such description simply takes up too much information storage space to be kept permanently on-line.

If editors can manage to get onto a national data base or some other bibliographic utility, they would essentially have a new form of publication (the data base) and, hopefully, a new source of revenue. Libraries, for example, are often paid or given credits for the MARC records they create. Apart from monetary considerations, going on-line with indexed editions could conceivably attract far more users than books or microfilm. A user would need only a microcomputer with a modem to gain access to the data bases of editions. In a single search for a name the user would have contact with the work of several documentary editing projects. If documentary editors have done their authority work well, that search could yield records for hundreds of documents in a matter of seconds; if done manually, through library visits or interlibrary loans or printed catalog searching, the same search would take weeks if not months.

Before editors rush into the new millennium of "connectivity" (i.e., networked information storage and retrieval), they should realize at least one danger that lurks in the future. Documentary editions projects' creation of data bases with on-line capability may be seen by some funding agencies and foundations as a low-cost alternative to both microfilm and book publishing, in the same manner that microfilm has been argued as appropriate for editions of lesser figures in American history. Editors who decide to pursue connectivity should make it clear to all grantors that the data bases being

constructed are meant only to increase the access to microfilm and book editions—else these editors may become more like archivists than they ever intended.

With this caveat in mind, editors have one other reason, one less tangible than the ones presented above, for becoming familiar with archival standards. Learning the standards gives often-isolated editors a sense of community. The archivists and librarians who developed the standards faced many of the same problems as editors do in their day-to-day tasks. Seeing how the standards deal with problems gives an editor a shock of recognition, even if editors reject the standards themselves. The standards took many minds and much discussion to construct. Editors who familiarize themselves with the standards thus engage in a dialogue with this on-going process of definition within the archival profession. This dialogue can enrich the decision making of editors and ultimately contribute to their sense of professionalization.