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“Public librarians are not interested in collection development issues.”

This essay is offered as advice to those who contemplate becoming or have recently become bibliographers. I begin with the admonition that neither users' studies, statistical analyses, nor approval plans compensate for a lack of knowledge of disciplinary research interests and bibliographic structure. In the final analysis, the best bibliographers are scholars. They keep current with a discipline's investigations and monitor its evolution. Even if they are unable to engage in detailed discourse on the more esoteric subjects its practitioners study, they understand its topography. That is, they possess a “feel” for what students in a given field find interesting, they understand its epistemology, know its publication trends and favored formats, and have a fine reference librarian's ability to use its bibliographic apparatus.

Academic librarians are being bombarded with an accelerating stream of news: new services, new public relations, new information formats, new technologies and new catalogs have been introduced during the past 10 to 15 years. Innovations are not always successfully assimilated by large academic libraries and dislocations associated with change in one department often affect the entire library. Coping strategies have been envisioned and even implemented, but usually are grafted onto existing, traditional organizational structures. Therefore, collection development and management in academic libraries is most sensibly addressed in terms of the larger library organization.

In The International Dictionary of Sports and Games, “sport” and “game” have the follow‐ing definitions:

Among many unflattering characterizations of librarians is the one that accuses us of wishing to keep our collections neat, clean and in proper order on the shelves. That is, not being used. This is a half‐true, if exaggerated, statement. As rational professionals, librarians realize that if a collection is well used it is not always in order and available, or else the collection is not as good as it should be. Control—knowing where an item is, who has it—is the goal librarians strive to achieve, rather than maintaining every item in its place.

Towards the middle of The Name of the Rose Adso of Melk realizes that “not infrequently books speak of books.… In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries‐old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.” With these thoughts in mind Adso asks his mentor William of Baskerville “what is the use of hiding books, if from the books not hidden you can arrive at the concealed ones?” William replies that “over the centuries it is no use at all. In a space of years or days it has some use.…” To which Adso, dumbfounded, asks “and is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing truth but for delaying its appearance?”

The heady system of high‐pressure Continental air that drifted across the Atlantic and collided with the traditional cyclonic patterns of U.S. literary academe in the mid‐1960s precipitated a “Theory Revolution” that has brought a couple of decades of stormy and stimulating weather to the campus. The collision has produced occasionally furious debate and resulted for higher education in the kind of public attention customarily reserved for athletic scandals; it has kept tenuring processes in turmoil and publish‐or‐perish mills working round the clock.

Collection development literature has burgeoned over the past decade, yet the complaint is still heard that college libraries are not engaged in meaningful collection development activities. College librarians often consider methods described in published research as too time‐consuming, technologically dependent, or statistically complex to apply to their own situations. How relevant is the literature to the practical needs of the collection developer? In addressing this question, a theoretical overview of collection development is presented, and recent publications reviewed, in terms of their relevance to collection planning, implementation, and evaluation in the small college library.

The verification of bibliographic information in a known item search can be both lengthy and tedious. The difficulties in using some of the traditional sources are well‐known. For example, the National Union Catalog provides access only through main entry; Books in Print and the Cumulative Book Index have author, title, and subject access but are limited by the fact that they cover only books either in print in a given year or published in a given year. The result can be a frustrating and, at times, fruitless search.

To the initiate in French studies, the term “French Literature” might be understood to mean anything — and everything — written in the French language. Etymologists would no doubt support this interpretation wholeheartedly. To scholars of French literature, however, the term has a very different meaning. Professors in the field generally consider French literature to be that written in France since the Middle Ages, a literature which stands apart from other written works in the French language. This is not to say that there is not a very substantial body of literature written, for instance, in French‐speaking Canada, or Algeria, Tunisia, Haiti, or a myriad of other places. Certain individuals specialize in the literature (French) of those countries, but they do not refer to those writings as “French Literature”; they label them “French‐Canadian Literature,” “French‐African Literature,” and the like. This essay will be limited to a discussion of French literature — the major literature of France, considered worthy of special attention or acclaim by readers and scholars worldwide.