The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published Collecting Global Resources, SPEC Kit 324, which explores the trends, practices, and challenges in collecting global resources in North American research libraries at a time of political and economic change, on the one hand, and of significant change in scholarly communication and collection management strategies, on the other. It covers global resources collections (including an overview of expenditures, collecting trends, sources of funding, and acquisition strategies), staff and organisational structure, preservation strategies, and discovery, public service, and outreach.
The survey results clearly demonstrate that support for global resources in North American research libraries is strong and predicted to remain so in the foreseeable future. Budget and space challenges, as well as increasing electronic access to resources with resulting changes in research habits of students and faculty, will create new and different patterns in collection growth. In response, many ARL libraries either already have or are in the process of creating organisational structures that facilitate intense outreach activities, in-depth reference, and collaborative collection development.
This SPEC Kit includes documentation from respondents that describes print and digital global collections, collection development policies, examples of research guides, and organisation charts. The table of contents and executive summary from this SPEC Kit are available online at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec-324-web.pdf.
Designed to examine current research library practices and policies and serve as resource guides for libraries as they face ever-changing management problems, each SPEC Kit contains a summary analysis, survey questions with tallies, pertinent documentation from participating libraries, and a reading list and Web site references for further information on the topic.
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