Before World War II, scholars played a large role in selection and collection building. Their knowledge of the materials helped librarians build solid collections with the least overlap among research collections. Today, conditions are very different, and nonspecialist librarians often do not have the information on which to base judgments about buying highly specialized materials. Small universities and colleges benefit from groups of local scholarly advisors, who guide them in purchasing materials to support their disciplines. Selecting material for offsite storage is a difficult task for librarians.
Stacks are full and there are few major library building projects.
Librarians have little choice but to relegate the less-used materials to less expensive offsite storage. The faculty who do use these materials feel disadvantaged because they must wait while materials are retrieved. Many visioning sessions held on campuses today seem unable to provide a sense of the functions technology will provide for libraries and archives in 10 to 15 years. A number of development projects are in fact underway in the industry, some even with library partners, but they seem uncoordinated. Members of the task force believe that there may be a disconnect between the vision that librarians have of their audience and the readers' own desires.