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Aims to compare and contrast different collection policies and shows a practical application of web‐based documentation.

The article is a case study and general review that discusses how significant numbers of libraries today are posting collection policies on the web, how these policies may differ in form and practice from those of the past, and how the Howard‐Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University developed and applied one such policy of its own. It also discusses examples of relevant literature and other collection policy web sites.

Its implications point to the value of developing sets of narrative collection policy statements focusing on specific academic disciplines and of beginning the policy‐making process with an assessment of the academic profile of the university that the library supports.

General discussion of collection policies has been absent from the literature for some time and the article should be valuable to those libraries without collection policies or those with older printed policies languishing in file cabinets.

This paper aims to explore questions and concepts encountered when developing policies for an institutional repository with a library publishing component.

The author describes how publishing needs and library vision shape institutional repository policies, and demonstrates that the repository’s guiding policies are determined by the repository’s purpose and scope.

Policies for institutional repositories with publishing components will vary across institutions depending on the intended purpose of the repository, scope of publishing activities and institutional context.

The article is useful for those just exploring library publishing with repositories and those looking to revamp their policies to accommodate this new use, the paper explores theoretical and practical questions about this new use of repositories.

Academic library consortia activity has become an integral part of academic libraries’ operations. Consortia have come to assert considerable bargaining power over publishers and have provided libraries with considerable economic advantage. They interact with publishers both as consumers of publishers’ products, with much stronger bargaining power than individual libraries hold, and, increasingly, as rival publishers themselves. Are consortia changing the relationship between academic libraries and publishers? Is the role of academic library consortia placing academic libraries in a position that should and will attract the attention of competition policy regulators? Competition policy prohibits buying and selling cartels that can negatively impact the free market on which the Canadian economic system, like other Western economies, depends. Competition policy as part of economic policy is, however, only relevant where we are concerned with aspects of the market economy. Traditionally, public goods for the greater social and cultural benefit of society are not considered part of the market economic system. If the activities of academic library consortia are part of that public good perspective, competition policy may not be a relevant concern. Using evidence gained from in-depth interviews from a national sample of university librarians and from interviews with the relevant federal government policy makers, this research establishes whether library consortia are viewed as participating in the market economy of Canada or not. Are consortia viewed by librarians and government as serving a public good role of providing information for a greater social and cultural benefit or are they seen from a market-economic perspective of changing power relations with publishers? Findings show government has little in-depth understanding of academic library consortia activity, but would most likely consider such activity predominantly from a market economic perspective. University librarians view consortia from a public good perspective but also as having an important future role in library operations and in changing the existing scholarly publishing paradigm. One-third of librarian respondents felt that future consortia could compete with publishers by becoming publishers and through initiatives such as open source institutional repositories. Librarians also felt that consortia have had a positive effect on librarians’ professional roles through the facilitation of knowledge building and collaboration opportunities outside of the home institution.

Building on past studies of library privacy policies, this review looks at how privacy information is shared at universities and colleges in the state of Florida. Beyond the question of whether a library-specific privacy policy exists, this review evaluates what is covered in the policies – whether topics such as how student data is stored, retained, de-identified and disposed of are broached in the statements, and whether specific data sets covering instruction, reference and surveillance are mentioned. The purpose of this study is to open the door to directed exploration into student awareness of privacy policies and spark conversation about positionality of libraries regarding privacy.

This review was done using a cross-sectional study design through observation of public-facing library privacy policies of higher education institutions in Florida.

Findings include that the majority of Florida academic libraries do not have a public-facing privacy policy. Only 15 out of the 70 schools reviewed had one. A large portion of those came from doctoral universities with associate’s colleges having none, and baccalaureate/associate’s colleges having only two. The policies that were in place tended to be institution-centered rather than patron-centered. Most categories of listed data collected were in the area of collections, website or computer usage.

The value of this review is that it adds to the literature studying privacy policies in academic libraries. Going forward, this research could address statewide practice in privacy policies as well as helping to lay pathways for working with students and other library patrons to gauge their interests and concerns about privacy.

G. Edward Evans defines “collection development” as “the process of assessing the strengths and weaknesses in a collection, and then creating a plan to correct the weaknesses and maintain the strengths.” He goes on to describe the collection development policy as “the written statement of that plan.…” Many librarians have acknowledged a responsibility to provide documentation of this process in the libraries they serve, yet few have done so. When the flush days of the sixties' Great Society were followed by the information explosion, inflation, and an era of accountability for service‐oriented institutions, the need for collection development policies became more urgent than it had been for decades. While selection of library materials has been of vital professional concern during most of the history of modern librarianship, it is only in the past decade that the preparation of selection or acquisitions policies (the terms have commonly been used interchangeably) and of collection development policies has received concentrated attention in library literature.

The academic library’s physical capacity and its service obligations to local users structured the traditional print collection. Largely freed of these constraints, the digital collection manager enjoys unprecedented freedoms but now contends with a collection susceptible to resource sprawl and scope ambiguity. This exploratory study aims to consider the possibility that intra-field social processes help to structure and routinize digital collection practice.

Lacking the constraints to which print collections are subject, electronic resource and digital library collections are more likely to reflect idiosyncratic institutional interests and therefore, to demonstrate significant variation. Evidence of homogeneity may suggest the influence of heretofore underexplored social structures. To determine the extent of such homogeneity, the author performed exploratory/descriptive content analyses on ten electronic resource collection development policies and six digital library collection development policies.

The data reveal among both the electronic resource and digital library collection policies significant uniformity. Content analyses demonstrate consistent themes (e.g. media, audience, selection priorities, etc.) and rhetoric. These findings lend support to the study’s central hypothesis regarding latent social structures. Analyses also reveal a set of unanticipated constraints unique to digital collection management.

Despite the breadth and maturity of literature addressing the Digital Turn in academic librarianship, relatively little attention has been paid to the social dimensions of collection management. This work represents an important corrective and suggests new theoretical approaches to the study of digital collection practice.

Library association policies and guidelines are important to study because they reflect consensus values of the profession. As such, they can shape the association, itself, and set the tone for the values of its individual members in their professional practice. From the titles alone, these documents proclaim themselves to be guides for the development of individual library policy. Additionally, as library and information science (LIS) graduate education programs are accredited by national associations, LIS schools pay attention to association policies and guidelines to help shape professional and continuing education. In these ways, they have a role in shaping professional ideology around a topic. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The services to persons with disabilities policies from three national-level LIS organizations were analyzed through a thematic analysis.

The guidelines speak to a shared understanding of disability and accessibility around the themes of library staff, library policies and library resources and services. While not surprising, additional themes around disability context and legislation show a shared understanding of accessibility that is much broader than what the legislation requires.

An analysis of guidelines on services to persons with disabilities from the American Library Association (ALA), Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) is of interest because of the ways these organizations intersect. The ALA and ALIA have reciprocal agreements so that students in LIS education programs are recognized as equivalents. Second, the ALA accredits library education programs in Canada. Given these intersecting relationships, the guidelines-shared notions of accessibility become of high interest.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the language of “weeding” (library deselection) within public library collection development policies in order to examine whether such policies and practices can be usefully connected to library and information science (LIS) theory, specifically to “Deweyan pragmatic adaptation” as suggested by Buschman (2017) in the pages of this journal.

This is a policy analysis of collection deselection policies from the 50 public libraries serving US state capitals, using Bacchi’s policy problem representation technique.

“Weeding” as described by these public library collection deselection policies is clearly pragmatic and oriented to increasing circulation to patrons, but the “Deweyan pragmatic adaptation” as reflected by many of those reviewed might better be defined as the pragmatism of Melvil Dewey rather than that of John Dewey.

Although this work reviewed policies from a very small sample of US public libraries, collection, selection and deselection language as shown in the policies studied appear to be consistent with neoliberal priorities and values in terms of prioritizing “circulation” and “customers,” which may have additional implications for the current transition from print to electronic materials in public libraries

John Dewey’s political philosophy and Carol Bacchi’s policy problem representation technique have not been widely used in policy analysis by LIS researchers, and this paper offers a number of suggestions for similar public library policy investigations.

Library resources evolve daily with ongoing expansion of electronic offerings by publishers and vendors. Collection development policies have long been employed to guide decision making and inform stakeholders, but how are these policies serving libraries and their users as our collections continue to move online? This paper aims to discuss the role of collection development polices, past and present, and the challenge of collections moving to an electronic format.

The authors performed a content analysis to discover how academic libraries are addressing this change in collection development.

The paper finds that virtually all libraries do an excellent job of addressing the traditional elements of collection development. About half of the libraries mentioned electronic licensing issues in the policy, but most of those were general statements.

Although the library profession is well aware of the changes that electronic resources bring to libraries, there is not a lot of research on how collection development policies should guide electronic resource management. As shown in this research, it is often completely left out of the collection development policy process.

This paper is based on a literature review and aims at providing guidelines for a school library development policy for Uganda. It presents the need for school libraries, describes the background to the policy formulation process, and analyses the existing legal and institutional framework for school libraries in Uganda. The paper highlights the current initiatives in support of school library development in Uganda and gives justification for a school library development policy for Uganda. Guidelines and implementation strategies are given to guide the formulation of this school library development policy.