Integrating Electronic Resources into Collection Development Policies

Abstract

Collection development policies are vitally important to librarians as a set of directions for the orderly selection, acquisition, and management of the materials they make available to their patrons. The policy provides a guideline for decisions on the selection and retention of materials in specific subjects, to specific levels of collection depth and breadth, defined in a number of ways (Osbum 1977). Carpenter (1984) states that without a collection development policy a library is engaged only in acquiring-spending money and adding books not in rationally and systematically developing its collection. The collection development policy provides a focus for the collection and identifies specific subject areas of greater and lesser concentration. This may hold true for collecting of electronic resources as well as for collecting of books. Incorporating electronic resources into the collection development policy allows the resources to take their place in the collection as supportive of the library's goals for each specific area. Selection of electronic resources outside the guidance of a collection development policy leads to haphazard unfocused groupings of resources that may or may not support the mission of the library.