Over the past few years I have been talking about three systemic ways in which collections, broadly understood, are evolving in a network environment. They are: the collective collection, the facilitated collection, and the inside-out collection.

Academic librarians struggle with how to meet their users’ need for print collections while coping with limited budgets and expanded demands on their physical space. While resource sharing has a long history in libraries, an approach that treats it as more than an afterthought has potential to reduce both unnecessary duplication and gaps in the collection. Technological advances can help make storage more efficient, faster delivery feasible, and management easier.

Harvard Library’s key alliances create a vast universe of information for Harvard faculty and students.

ACRL’s “2016 Top Trends in Academic Libraries” noted a “shift to the incorporation and integration of more continuous, ongoing, flexible, and sustainable review of collections,” and “an increasing need” to align collection development with “institutional research and curricular requirements.” This article describes these trends playing out at a top-ranked research library. Given the library’s long history of collecting print books, the article examines the monographic acquisitions program from multiple angles, including circulation, expenditures, approval plans, and e-book usage. There are also suggestions for additional metrics to evaluate collections as a service, as well as questions posed to frame an ongoing research and assessment agenda. The models described in this case study and the proposed research and assessment agenda can be adapted by other academic libraries, both to fit local institutional needs and as collection development and “collections as a service” are increasingly realized within interinstitutional collaborative networks.

Georgia Tech and Emory's plan to build shared library collection begins in earnest this month. Partnership could lay the foundation for library consortium in Atlanta area.

I am interested by recent discussions I have had with librarians at various law libraries about how they make decisions about what materials to keep, cancel, or discard. Many are looking at the holdings of other libraries and relying on them to provide access to less commonly used materials rather than maintaining them locally. This […]

The library directors of Drake University, Grinnell College, Grand View University, Central College, and Simpson College officially announced the formation of the Central Iowa Collaborative Collections Initiative (CI-CCI) earlier this month. Teri Koch, collection development coordinator for Cowles Library at Drake University, and Pam Rees, director of the Grand View University Library, first became interested...

Maine shared-preservation strategy.