Collection Development and Management

Looking through the literature of music librarianship, one is struck by the curious fact that what is considered by music librarians to be their most profound and sacred professional trust--the intellectual activity of selecting materials with which to build strong collections--has received relatively little attention. [1] So wrote James B. Coover in 1973. Two aspects of this quotation deserve comment. First, more than twenty-five years later, one is struck by the continuing dearth of literature dealing specifically with collection development in music libraries. [2] Second, Coover's characterization of collection development as a "profound and sacred professional trust" is a concept that will not necessarily garner universal assent in the American library world at the turn of the millennium. [3] Less in academic music libraries than in the larger library systems of which they are often a part, collection development as a discrete library function has with some frequency of late been downgraded, the role of bibliographers and subject specialists--who have the responsibility to select materials in areas where they have scholarly training--sometimes eliminated. Further, it is far more common today to read that librarians are primarily explorers of and guides to electronic and Internet resources than it is to read that librarians are stewards of the human intellectual record. The latter can seem painfully old-fashioned and insufficiently proactive in the so-called "information age" (though I will argue that the role of steward of the human intellectual record is more--rather than less--important in the digital age). This downgrading of collection development, with its historic interest in developing collections of books and journals, is directly related to a series of myths that appeared and for the most part disintegrated in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The first myth was that books (and print media generally) were soon to disappear, and with them the concept of the library as storehouse for such materials. In this myth, all past writings would be digitized, and, as the common wisdom had it, one could have the entire intellectual content of the Library of Congress on a few CD-ROMs. While digitization brings with it enormous potential for certain classes of materials, we have since realized that from the point of view of long-term preservation, the printed book or journal (sometimes necessarily reformatted on acid-free paper) is at present a more stable medium than is the digital document. In a related myth, given digital information and the concomitant reduced need for traditional books and libraries, librarians would, of course, no longer work in libraries and with collections. Rather, they would be information brokers who would search the Internet on behalf of their clients, providing information more than engaging with the processes of teaching and scholarship. Allied with these two myths was that of access rather than ownership--the notion that libraries could focus less than heretofore on actually housing needed documents. Rather, those documents that could not be obtained directly from the Internet would be purchased for the user from a document delivery service or obtained from other libraries. In this myth, ownership of materials--and by implication the traditional functions of collection development--were no longer necessary. The major flaw in the access/ownership debate was the naive belief that those few large research libraries that would continue to collect and catalog would share boundlessly with those libraries on the cutting edge who would invest more and more of their resources in the provision of information and access from electronic resources. If the tone here seems somehow too pessimistic, even cynical, with respect to the institutional denigration of collection development in some academic research libraries, it is possible to be rather more optimistic when looking at academic music libraries, where music librarians continue to engage in the vital intellectual task of carefully and purposefully building music collections for varying groups of students and teachers, performers and scholars. …