Navigating the Parallel Universe: Education for Collection Management in the Electronic Age - collection of electronic and printed library resources

Library Trends, Spring, 2000 by Virgil L. P. Blake, Thomas T. Surprenant

These findings add weight to the priority given collection development by Stueart and Drabenstott and Atkins in their recommendations concerning a core curriculum in library/information studies education. Let us now turn to the concept of collection development and its place in the library/information science curriculum.

COLLECTION BUILDING? COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT? COLLECTION MANAGEMENT

Before giving further consideration to the educational program, library/information science professionals with a paramount interest in the resources of the library/information center need to review some of the major findings about collection development, especially in regards to the scope of this specialty. In his consideration of this specialization, Edelman (1979) suggested a three tier model including: (1) collection development: defined as the planning aspect of this role; (2) selection: making decisions on what to include in the collection; and (3) acquisition: focused on the securing of the chosen items (p. 34). Rowley and Black (1996) noted that in the 1960s and 1970s there was a "shift in most academic libraries toward defining collection development as significantly different from acquisitions" (p. 24). By the end of the 1980s, Pankake (1984) observes, "acquisitions has been separated from selection in larger libraries ...; it now is a technical specialty" (p. 193). Nisonger (1994) has examined the place of this new specialty in library/information science education and offered alternatives for preparing professionals for this aspect of the library/information center's operations. The focus here is on the first two tiers of the Edelman model.

The original primary emphasis in courses in collection development was selection. For many years the classic textbook in schools of library and information science education was Haines's Living with Books (1950). The central theme was the selection of individual titles for inclusion in the library collection. This basic theme was the same throughout the 1970s. A very popular text in that period was Building Library Collections (Carter, Bonk, & Magrill, 1974; Bonk & Magrill, 1979) that devoted 223 of its 324 pages to selection, selection tools, publishers, and bibliographic resources. During this same period, library/information centers began to experience new pressures on their collections in the form of the publication explosion, ever rising costs for materials, and newer media. Simultaneously, there was an increasing reliance on technology that added to budgetary problems, especially in the area of technical services. In this setting, book selection began to be replaced by a new concept, collection development.

Book selection remained a central element in collection development but the responsibilities of those working with the library/information center's collection were expanded to include "community analysis, planning for collection building, collection development policies, selection, selection tools, publishing, intellectual freedom and censorship, weeding, and collection evaluation" (Nisonger, 1994, p. 129). Titles now being considered for inclusion in the collection were to meet criteria such as how they "mesh with others ..." (Osburn, 1983, p. 177). The principles of book selection were extended to include other media and "making the collection itself, rather than any particular title, the principle object of attention" (Pankake, 1984, p. 189). Now selectors were required to consider how a title fit into the local collection. Collection development, in some library/information centers, came to mean weeding, circulation, and preservation. Complicating the picture was the tendency of library/ information service professionals to interchange the terms "collection development" and "collection management."