Desire

Selection Criteria: Examples

On this page you can find links to the selection criteria of a number of gateways and services that have used DESIRE research to inform the development of their resource selection criteria.

DESIRE suggests that each gateway needs to develop its own unique set of selection criteria to take the information needs of the user group and the aims of the service into account. The examples given here, illustrate the way that DESIRE guidelines ca n be used to develop service-specific criteria.

There are a number of advantages in developing a set of explicit selection criteria for a gateway or library:

helps users to appreciate that the service is selective and quality controlled
helps users to understand what type of quality information they will find when using the service
helps staff to be consistent in their selection and to maintain the quality of the collection
the criteria can be used to train new staff

These examples will be of interest to librarians, academics or information professionals interested in developing their own selection criteria, whether for a gateway or library OPAC. The DESIRE guidelines draw upon the "state of the art" review described in the report cited below and can aid the swift development of service-specific selection criteria.

Biz/ed (Business Education on the Internet)
http://www.bized.ac.uk/listserv/quality.htm

The Quality Criteria for Biz/ed

DutchESS (Dutch Electronic Subject Service)
http://www.konbib.nl/dutchess/manual/

The Dutchess Manual (available in Dutch only).

EELS (Engineering Electronic Library)
http://www.ub2.lu.se/eel/qualcrit.html

The Quality and Selection Policy for EELS.

SOSIG (The Social Science Information Gateway)
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/escope.html
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/collect.html
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/desire/ecrit.html

The Scope Policy, Collection Management Policy and the Selection Criteria for SOSIG.