Managing Traditional Materials in an Online Environment: Some Definitions and Distinctions for a Future Collection Management

Abstract

Collection management (as opposed to collection development) should be understood as the activity of adding value to—or deleting value from—objects of information subsequent to their selection. The management of materials in traditional formats will become increasingly problematic the more we move into an online environment. Although digital resources will sooner or later come to dominate scholarly communication, the effective management of traditional materials will remain essential. While a central goal of libraries must be to manage traditional and digital resources as two aspects of a single service, we must also recognize that all information services will eventually be conditioned by a digital mentality. In order to start planning now for collection management to play a more prominent role in the future of information services, we must begin to define with as much precision as possible the abstract values collection management adds to and deletes from selected information objects.