Short description:

A guide to balancing traditional collection issues with electronic access and document delivery demands, Collection Development: Access in the Virtual Library helps librarians find solutions and approaches for dealing with changes occurring in interlibrary loan, regional consortia, commercial vendor relations, and ownership versus access. Its sophisticated analyses offer you clarity of vision, the wisdom of experience, and solid advice as you are transported into the 'virtual library environment' with its variety of expectations, service complexities, and information technologies.

Long description:

A guide to balancing traditional collection issues with electronic access and document delivery demands, Collection Development: Access in the Virtual Library helps librarians find solutions and approaches for dealing with changes occurring in interlibrary loan, regional consortia, commercial vendor relations, and ownership versus access. Its sophisticated analyses offer you clarity of vision, the wisdom of experience, and solid advice as you are transported into the `virtual library environment&&&8217;with its variety of expectations, service complexities, and information technologies.

Interested in reducing local collecting costs while expanding the universe of information and knowledge available to your primary clientele? Collection Development will show you just how many options are out there for enhancing your virtual environment, as it explores:

• teaching your users advancing bibliographical retrieval and assessment methodologies
• the delivery of library resources electronically for distributed learning/distance education
• conducting CD-Rom collection development comparisons
• planning space for a more technologically oriented research environment
• enriching your on-line catalog with contents pages and new indexing capabilities
• the impact of change and shifting paradigms on public services staffing
• the development of good electronic presentation design
  
  Still not convinced that this is the book you need to improve access in your library? Think again! Collection Development will help you with library control and ordering articles via commercial document delivery; it will help you develop coherent and intuitive ways of organizing and presenting available electronic resources; it will help you work with administrators and funding agents to attain a balance between traditional library resources and emerging information technologies, and much, much more!

Table of Contents:

Introduction The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Future of the Library Profession May You Live in Interesting Times: The Impact of Revolutions and Shifting Paradigms on Public Services Staff Had We But World Enough, and Time The Study of Subject Strengths: Overlap and National Collecting Patterns: The Uses of the OCLC/AMIGOS Collection Analysis CD and Alternatives to It Distributed Education and Libraries The Politics of the Virtual Collection Library Acquisitions 1986?1995: A Select Bibliography Ownership or Access to Electronic Information--A Selective Bibliography Conclusion Index