Collection Development Today

If someone has something to say, they have never had it so good. People can get their word out by posting to a blog, by editing a wiki or a web site, or even by using cost-effective print-on-demand book production services. In other words, collection development librarians now live in a world of hurt. All these methods, as well as a number of others, fall outside the conventional ones librarians use to select and aggregate content. If a book is not in a publisher's catalog or an approval plan, collection development librarians are likely to know nothing of it. But in a world where important content is often not part of the traditional publishing infrastructure, libraries risk becoming increasingly irrelevant unless they thoroughly reengineer their collection-building strategies. Do these new methods of creating content mean that old ones such as print publishing are going away? It means that collection development librarians not only cannot eliminate anything they already do, but they must also add an entirely new set of activities. This article describes these new activities.