3 - Developing collections in the digital world

Summary

Any library that is actually installed in a specific place and that is made up of real works available for consultation and reading, no matter how rich it might be, gives only a truncated image of all accumulable knowledge.

(Chartier, 1992, 88)

The library of the future seems indeed to be in a sense a library without walls … the library of the future is inscribed where all texts can be summoned, assembled, and read – on a screen.

(Chartier, 1992, 89)

Introduction

The universal library, holding all the world's printed artefacts, has been a utopian vision for several centuries, according to Chartier (1992, 62). This vision underpins the amassing of great collections in research and public libraries – the goal being to have all of human knowledge under one roof. When these collections were being put together, long gone were the days when any one individual could have read all of the writings of the world, if indeed they ever existed, but the dream of one space where the reader could wander around and interact with all of human ideas, history and memory was a seductive but elusive one. Now there are new utopian visions of the universal virtual library, where the user can surf through cyberspace and find all of human knowledge waiting to be accessed. Most modern libraries have more pragmatic goals: to build collections which satisfy most of the information needs for most of their users. In the digital world, the means of achieving these goals are changing, the costs of doing so are problematic, and the communities of users are fluid. As McPherson suggests, ‘A library today has to be part of a global or national network if it is to meet all its users’ needs’ (McPherson, 1997, 1). In this chapter, we examine the increasing use of digital resources that are obtained from outside the library, and how these relate to the analogue collections that are the traditional province of libraries. Is digital collection development different from collection development of non-digital resources? What are the strategic issues facing library and information professionals charged with the delivery of hybrid information, much of which they may not have direct control of?

This chapter will discuss the following issues:

• • why digital?

• • advantages of digital data

• • the new universal library: the distributed hybrid library