It is generally accepted in the library world that an automated catalog means more accessible data for patrons, greater productivity for librarians, and an improvement in the sharing of bibliographic data among libraries. While the desirability of automation is not a controversial issue, some aspects of automating remain problematic. This article…

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…

The use of information regarding the ages of library items is a standard component of many approaches to weeding library collections, and has a long history in the literature of collection management. Current and past approaches to using aging information to make weeding decisions make use of very arbitrary decision criteria. This study examined…

Examines factors to consider when selecting materials to be digitized: copyrights; intellectual nature of the source materials; current and potential users; actual and anticipated nature of use; format and nature of the digital product; describing, delivering, and retaining the digital product; relationships to other digital efforts; and costs and…

This resource guide focuses on handling library materials that are too deteriorated to benefit from other preservation treatments. Hopeless case items, that would require an unreasonable amount of conservation work to fix, can be resolved through a process of reselecting items by replacing them or reformatting them. The reselection integrates…

Collections conservation is an approach to the preservation treatment of books and book-like materials that is conceptualized and organized in terms of large groups of materials. This guide is intended to enable a library to evaluate its current collections conservation activities. The introduction describes collections conservation and gives…

This book presents the following papers on library organizational and management issues: (1) "Knowledge Management: An Essential Framework for Corporate Library Leadership" (Deanna J. Streng); (2) "Critical Factors for Collaboration in an Academic Library Setting" (Charlotte M. Knoche); (3) "Salaries of Academic Librarians…