Collection Development Trends Meeting Notes

Julia Gelfand, UC- Irvine, facilitated this discussion concentrating on the scope of current collection development trends in the wake of pressures brought to bear on the discipline from budget constraints and new staffing realities. What follows are the topics and highlights of issues raised regarding the future of collection development.

What kind of pressure is library collection development feeling from outsourcing?
Do we need to know 'what's on the shelf' anymore? What concerns are being raised about supplying books in an age of increasing e-book availability?
Are libraries using 'click analysis' to quantify the need for book renewals? Are libraries becoming more selective, looking for usage of a particular book/author before buying new editions?
What will be the role of collection development in future?
For 'on -demand' services like ILL, are libraries re-charging associated costs to the user?
Each year, hundreds of new journals are published. How does ordering or NOT ordering new journals affect curriculum support and/or revenue stream?
Where are e-books, consortial purchasing, cooperative collection development, approval plans and open access headed?

These emerging trends were touched on, but deemed future stand-alone conference topics:

Patron-driven collection development and Approval plans: Cost driven by users over a period of time, being pro-rated? Must approval plans then make allowances for purchase of domestic as well as foreign books which STEM (Science, technology, engineering, math) libraries purchase?
E-books: Growth of purchase plans through aggregators like Blackwell, Gobi, Knovel, NetLibrary, E-brary or via publishers like CRC Press, Safari, Springer ... Concern that Springer's STEM books may only be available electronically (e-book) by 2013 ... are e-books sustainable if the model changes due to merging, collapse of e-book aggregating organizations or cancellations of books? What happens to the retrospective editions of a book if an e-book reference collection is cancelled, does content disappear? How will students be taught to extract data from e-books? (e-books publish chapter-by-chapter downloads)
Cooperative or consortium collection development, catalogs: Will there be mandatory limits on the number of books purchased in consortial arrangements? What will be the effect of such arrangements on large research libraries if they are limited to books purchased using a cooperative arrangement? Is this model customizable - can libraries opt-in or opt-out of such purchase arrangements? What are costs associated with owning or licensing books over the long term or in perpetuity? How to track usage data when we license e-books via cooperative arrangements? How to determine cost of purchasing resources for individual library members of a consortial agreement?
Reference books: Some are being converted to open circulation rather than in-library use only or converted to online/e-book access. What agreements will cooperative libraries have to make with vendors and each other for access to these titles? (See "Tools for small colleges: Using Yankee Book Pedder to facilitate cooperative collection development" (Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services Volume 27, Issue 2, Summer 2003, Pages 173-178, available via Science Direct database).
Role of librarians: How will the new purchase and collection development model affect our roles as influencers in shaping academic library collections? How will we respond to faculty demands for books and access to electronic resources ... What will be our role in determining the impact on libraries when responding to new educational programs at our institutions? What kind of planning goes into determining the right mix of e-books, reference tools and traditional texts to support new curriculum standards? How must we respond to scholarly best practices, i.e. open access, fees and costs associated with servicing and maintaining institutional repositories? How to communicate with faculty about lack of capital and other funds necessary to purchasing books and other resources, and in maintaining institutional and digital repositories?