Page 145 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

efficiently, distributing the investment in a balanced fashion so that it is profitable.
• Because the selection must be put together by each team of professionals who lead and manage a project or service, who know what they want to achieve and are capable of weighing up a large number of factors and are not simply at the mercy of eco- nomic interests, market trends and fashion, partiality, etc.
There are many reasons, qualitative or quan- titative, general or particular, originating from within or outside a reading project or service. What is always important is for our choice to be conscious – both of the “product” at hand and of the “need” we intend it to meet.
Select – but how?
Before starting the selection process we need to create a set of gauges and procedures for unifying the approach and procedure of all the staff involved in the task, to enable us to assess the value of works.
The first step is to establish selection criteria, both general and specific, to help define the best profile of the different types of materials we are going to analyse. This “ideal” established by the criteria will serve as a mirror in which to examine the work to be assessed to determine how close or far it is from the model.
Comparing the work with the established ideal will allow us to issue a judgement and put together a critical summary based on the assess- ment process.
The criteria we might use fall into different categories:
• Some will be more centred on the work itself, on its literary aspects or its value as a source of information.
• The type and format will also require particular attention.
• Others will focus more on the target readers.
It is important for these established criteria to be combined flexibly with a good deal of common sense, intelligence, organisational and profes- sional skills, and a good knowledge of available reading materials and reader profiles.
To help put the battery of criteria into practice, we will need to use a number of parameters, adopt a series of indicators for each parameter we define and establish procedures or protocols for acting.
Select – with what criteria?
The task of selecting must be governed and guided by a series of general criteria and a set of specific criteria to be applied in accordance with the type of work.
We use the criteria to establish degrees of acceptance and rejection that help us measure the quality of a reading material. But rather
than establishing a strict boundary between good and bad, the criteria outline what an ideal work should be like based on the qualities we consider works of a particular category or type should have. This point of reference that is taken as a model is a tool for analysing a particular reading material, comparing it and relating it to others and, ultimately, choosing it or rejecting it depending on its estimated value.
These points of reference are woven from different strands and contain different criteria, some of which stem from considerations of
the content of the work; others relate to the readers, and others still are linked to society and its values.
Regarding the coordinates which mark the above three core points, we will attempt to:
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Readers in the digital age