Two librarians at Western Oregon State College, a small liberal arts institution serving 4,000 students, rebuilt the library's test collection in 1990 and, in the process, broadened it beyond its traditional education and psychology emphasis into an interdisciplinary collection. At the outset, the project received generous funding and an annual…

Traditionally, archivists have been involved mainly in the intellectual preservation of library materials and the selection, appraisal, processing, and cataloging of library collections. Due to the relatively short (approximately 50 years) stability of the paper commonly used for printed and written documents since the mid-nineteenth century, the…