Argues that preservation and collection development can be effectively coordinated only when the underlying political forces driving these two operations are defined and compared. The discussion explores some of the functions and values of preservation and collection development from a primarily political point of view in three contexts:…

Discusses collection development policy as means to express and systematize guidelines for collection building that fulfill three basic functions: the referential, the generative, the rhetorical. Division of policy into subject categories, and use of "collection levels" to rank the collection and collecting effort for each subject are…