Shifting Boundaries
| Autor: | Joseph J. Branin |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1998 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Collection Management. 23:1-17 |
| ISSN: | 1545-2549 0146-2679 |
| DOI: | 10.1300/j105v23n04_01 |
| Popis: | SUMMARY. In this paper I would like to take the reader on a whirlwind review of collection management practices and issues in research libraries in the United States. Although I will greatly compress and oversimplify the contemporary history of collection management, the brevity is not as extreme as it may at first appear, for it was not until the 1950s that collection development in the United States began to emerge as a coherent management science. Over a period of about thirty-five years, from roughly 1950 through the mid-1980s, collection building in research libraries in the United States was professionalized and codified. In the first part of this paper I will review three significant is-sues-the rapid expansion of education, scholarship, and library collections; the shift from collection development to collection management; and attempts at cooperative collection developmcnt-that influenced the evolution of collection management during this formative period INTRODUCTION: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF COLLECTION MANAGEMENT During the last decade, from the mid-1980s to the present, the new science of collection management has had little chance to form a solid core of practice or tradition because current economic and technological changes have quickly modified or even reversed recently established ideas about how best to operate collection management programs. In the second part of this paper I will examine the most important challenges-a weak library economy, a new digital information system, and pervasive change-facing collection management librarians during the last ten years. Finally, based on lessons learned from the last half of the twentieth century, I will make some predictions about what collection management will look like at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I believe research librarians will truly be engaged by the theme of local access to global collections. THE FORMATIVE YEARS OF COLLECTION MANAGEMENT: 1950-1985 The contemporary history of collection management in research libraries in the United States began in the 1950s as America emerged from World War II as a preeminent world power. For the next thirty-five years, the rapid expansion of education, scholarship, publications, and library collections in the United States-an expansion often called "the information explosion"- created great optimism and innovation in research librarianship. Librarians found themselves managing large sums of money and rapidly expanding collections in not just a few prestigious or national libraries but in literally hundreds of emerging research libraries scattered across the country. With their ranks increasing and their libraries growing, research librarians began to feel the need to examine their acquisition efforts and to begin codifying and organizing their collection building activities. There was a call in research librarianship to move from just "developing" or acquiring collections to more scientifically "managing" them. 1 |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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