Shifting Boundaries: Managing Research Library Collections at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

In this paper I would like to take the reader on a whirlwind review of collection management practices and issues in research libraries in the United States. Although I will greatly compress and oversimplify the contemporary history of collection management, the brevity is not as extreme as it may at first appear, for it was not until the 1950s that collection development in the United States began to emerge as a coherent management science. Over a period of about thirty-five years, from roughly 1950 through the mid-1980s, collection building in research libraries in the United States was professionalized and codified. In the first part of this paper I will review three significant issues-the rapid expansion of education, scholarship, and library collections; the shift from collection development to collection management; and attempts at cooperative collection developmcnt that influenced the evolution of collection management during this formative perio