The changing collection management environment

What is collection management?

For someone not familiar with librarians and their terminology, the phrase 'collection management' is likely to be puzzling, or at best unrevealing. It is not an especially transparent phrase - indeed, the non-librarian might be forgiven for thinking that it must be virtually a synonym for librarianship itself. One might reasonably think that the core of the traditional work of librarians is the management of its collection of materials.

Among librarians, however, the phrase 'collection management' has come to be used in a somewhat narrower and more specialised sense. According to this usage, 'collection management' is concerned with a set of interrelated library activities focusing on the selection, acquisition, evaluation, preservation and deselection (or weeding) of library materials. It does not include everything that might logically be regarded as part of managing a collection. For example, cataloguing and classification, and the corresponding procedures for the bibliographic control of internet resources, could logically be regarded as part of managing a collection, but these are not generally considered under the heading 'collection management'. This is largely no doubt because they are such rich and complex specialisations in their own right. Similarly, the area of librarianship which focuses on providing advice to readers to help them satisfy their information needs is not usually regarded as part of collection management, though of course selection and other collection management activities must be conducted with a constant awareness that the primary reason for collecting is to serve the needs of present and future library users.

Collection development and collection management

The literature relating to collection management is enormous. Anyone reading this literature will, however, quickly encounter another term, 'collection development', which like collection management is often employed to serve as an umbrella term covering activities like selection, acquisition and deselection.

What then is the difference between collection management and collection development? Unfortunately, as so often is the case in the social sciences, the answer is not straightforward because terminology has not been fully standardised. Some writers use collection management almost exclusively, others clearly prefer 'collection development', while still others employ both but establish a distinction in meaning between them. The ways in which this distinction is drawn vary considerably. Indeed, there are writers for whom collection management is a subdivision of collection development, and others for whom collection development is a subdivision of collection management!

Collection development is the older term. Probably thinking primarily of the United States, Richards and Eakin (1997, p.xxi) state that it was in use in academic libraries from at least the 1950s, 'and in public libraries a few years prior to that', but references to it in the published literature before the 1960s are not easy to find. The term became popular in North American academic libraries during the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time of explosive expansion in the higher education sector. Student and staff numbers were increasing at a far greater rate than ever before, and resources were available to purchase library materials on an unprecedented scale. There was no shortage of materials to buy - in fact, the term 'information explosion' became a cliché to describe the dramatic increase in publications made possible by increased prosperity and a greatly enlarged number of scholars and researchers able and willing to publish their findings.

The activities that came to be grouped together and termed collection development were not themselves new, of course. Librarians selected and acquired materials, attempted to keep them safe and in good condition, and deselected, at least in some sense of these phrases, at the library of Alexandria two thousand years ago. What was new was a growing sense of this or a similar grouping of activities as having a certain coherence and of being worthy of detailed examination and discussion. A preconference held in 1977 before the American Library Association's annual conference in Denver, Colorado, is sometimes seen as the real 'coming of age' of collection development as a recognised and important specialisation within librarianship, and certainly the number of publications devoted to the subject and using the term 'collection development' increased rapidly after this date (Johnson 2004, p. 14).

A contributing influence was the increasing inability of teaching and research staff in major universities in the United States to perform the work of library selection that they had performed when keeping track of publications in one's discipline was a far less overwhelming task (and one for which academics had more time). This meant that responsibility for selection largely passed into the hands of the staff of university libraries who, lacking detailed subject knowledge in most areas in which they needed to select, felt impelled to work out principles for performing selection, and the tasks that seemed associated with it, logically and effectively. But while this factor was significant, partly because of the major role played by American academic librarians in published discussions of collection development, it is important not to overemphasise it. Collection development also became popular in public libraries, where selection had been largely in the hands of libraries for several decades, in special libraries, and in smaller academic institutions where the transfer of selection responsibility from teachers and researchers to librarians was less pronounced than in the larger United States universities (see Osburn 1990, p.5). Selection by librarians also became popular in Australian universities, though academic staff continued to play a major role in selection at most of them.

In Australia and New Zealand, as elsewhere in the Western world, it is tempting, faced with the realities of the early twenty-first century, to idealise the 1960s and early 1970s as a golden age of prosperity for the community at large and for libraries in particular. In fact, of course, there were many problems, and some powerful obstacles in the path of collection managers, thirty or forty years ago. In Australasia at that time communication with suppliers of library materials based in the United Kingdom or the United States was normally by airmail postage, which meant that a response to a query could not be expected in less than a fortnight from the time it was sent. But despite the problems, the period was one of optimistic growth in which libraries, funded more generously than ever before, saw opportunities to expand their collections greatly and to develop them to meet the needs and wants of patrons much more effectively than had previously been the case. Collection development seemed a suitable phrase to describe what they were attempting to do: the word 'development' seemed quite appropriately to imply growth and realisation of potential.

When the American Library Association (ALA) published the ALA glossary of library and information science in 1983, 'collection development' was clearly its preferred term, and the definition from this source was reprinted without alteration in a 1996 ALA publication, Guide for training collection development librarians:

collection development. A term which encompasses a number of activities related to the development of the library collection, including the determination and coordination of selection policy, assessment of needs of users and potential users, collection use studies, collection evaluation, identification of collection needs, selection of materials, planning of resource sharing, collection maintenance, and weeding (ALA 1996, p.45).

As is now known, the long period of growing general prosperity in Western countries which extended from the 1950s into the early 1970s was not destined to continue indefinitely, and following an 'oil crisis' in 1973 there were increasing signs of economic problems throughout the Western world, increasing difficulties in funding education and libraries, and an increasing reluctance to spend money on them unless there was a very tangible benefit from doing so - something that public and academic libraries in particular had difficulty in demonstrating. Compounding these problems, which have prevailed into the twenty-first century, prices of library materials, particularly periodicals and to a lesser extent books, have escalated at a rate usually far greater than that of general inflation. This has meant that even relatively fortunate libraries have found it impossible to avoid cutting back on the extent of their purchasing.

As a result, from the mid-1970s there were suggestions, which rapidly won support among writers on the subject, that 'collection development' was no longer an appropriate term to describe what libraries were doing, or needed to do, because the term implied growth rather than management of increasingly limited resources (Mosher 1982; Branin 1994), p.xii. A new term, 'collection management', was proposed as a substitute more appropriate to the new circumstances. Referring particularly to academic libraries, Clare Jenkins and Mary Morley...