Wallace Olsen

Who is Wallace Olsen?

Wallace Olsen was a librarian and early proponent of digital libraries.

Beginning in the 1960s, Olsen published the groundwork for digital repositories of Land-grant university library collections in the United States. By the late 1980s, with the growing availability of machine-readable data on academic journals and books, Olsen had developed a selection methodology for "core literature" collections of scholarly materials. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1988 Olsen established the Core Literature Project at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library. Extensive bibliographies of scholarly monographs and serials for specific subjects and their sub-disciplines were ranked using citation analysis to determine levels of use over time. Additional input came from scholars from across the United States who provided subject expertise regarding the relative value, historical importance, and potential future use of the historical publications listed in the bibliographies. The priority-ranked lists identified the most important books and journals for each subject area in the literature published in North America, regardless of holdings of any particular library’s collection. The findings documented by the Core Literature Project were published in the 1990s as a seven-volume series, The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences of which Olsen was the series editor.