2015 Charleston Library Conference

The role of building collections is multi-faceted and distributed. Departments including collection development, special collections, archives, and IR participate in defining policies and goals. These facets of a library’s content strategy may not be well aligned as each department will have different collecting objectives and audience. Silos result, with different units taking ownership of content types and platforms, making it difficult to strategically and collaboratively address the challenges of an evolving scholarship landscape.
A collections program must integrate the management of physical and digital content, licensed and owned materials, published and unpublished works, and traditional and rapidly emerging new scholarship products such as data, web archiving, blogs, images, and multimedia. In this environment, the content strategy must be broader than print or electronic format decisions. It should encompass all streams of content so that no formats are overlooked and an organization has policies and procedures in place to acquire them.
This presentation will describe UNLV’s ongoing efforts to develop a collaborative and content driven strategy for all collecting. The session will provide attendees with an overview of the complexity of collecting in today’s landscape and will highlight opportunities involved with cross-organizational collaborations and policy setting. Attendees will learn about strategies and collaborative approaches based on the experiences of UNLV librarians and their efforts to proactively align collecting efforts across the organization.