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This bibliographic essay reviews the English‐language collection development and management literature published in 1997. Selection, deselection, access as an alternative to ownership, collection evaluation, user studies, organization and staffing for collection development, serials collection management, and electronic resource collection management, among other topics, are included. The primary emphasis is on articles, books, and book chapters. More than 180 items are covered in the essay.

Introduces and analyzes basic library collection management issues regarding electronic journals, including selection, budgeting, policy making, collection evaluation, and preservation/archiving. Argues that staffing and budgeting for electronic journals can be organized on subject‐based or format‐based approaches, or some combination of both. Electronic journals are selected through the same three‐stage process used for print journals: identification, evaluation, and selection. Most of the traditional criteria for print journals are also applicable to electronic journals, but additional criteria are superimposed on them. The cancellation and weeding of electronic journals have not been addressed by the profession, but will assume more significance in the future. There is a need for new client‐centered evaluation methodologies that focus on availability and accessibility rather than ownership.

This bibliographic essay, which reviews the collection development literature published during 1996, is organized into sections covering: bibliographic work; general and miscellaneous works; access and document delivery; collection development policies; materials budgets and budgeting; collection evaluation; collection development for specific subjects, audiences, or formats; electronic resources; use studies; collection development administration, organization, and staffing; and serials collection management. More than 150 items are included in the review.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the utility of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar as citation analysis tools for the social sciences.

The 25 most‐accessed articles in 163 social sciences journals are searched in three citation databases.

Web of Science has long been the only tool for citation analysis. Scopus and Google Scholar, while still new to the market, are complementary to Web of Science and in some cases can provide a more nuanced view of the importance of scholarly articles in the social sciences.

As libraries struggle to provide the best tools to their users, they may wish to consider the freely‐available Google Scholar as a substitute or complement to expensive databases such as Web of Science and Scopus.

Most analyses of citation databases have focused on the sciences. Because this study examined the social sciences literature, it has expanded on the research available on Web of Science, Google Scholar and Scopus.

To explore the status, interests, and intentions of peer reviewers and how editors enlist and muster these factors to enhance the prestige of a scholarly publication.

Case study: use of a 30‐year accumulation of editorial office records of one scholarly journal to analyze the contents of peer review comments and correspondence; direct quotes highlight key themes.

Peer reviewers labor to obtain more than the certification, authentication, and quality of individual works. The volume and variety of commentary generated by a double‐blind peer review process reveal concerns behind reviewer comments to authors and effects over time.

The study centers on one journal, Libraries & Culture, a publication committed to the specialized, interdisciplinary research about the history of libraries and the collection of cultural records.

The strategic nature of the administration and management of the invisible work of peer reviewers becomes more apparent. The interests and intentions of peer reviewers surface in commentary intended only for authors. Commentary relates to a variety of themes including personal interests, pedagogical and disciplinary objectives, field expansion agendas as well as the prestige of the publication. These themes suggest peer review as a potentially effective guiding mechanism for long‐term endeavors that benefit author, reviewer, and editor as interrelated players in arenas where distinction is at stake.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the overall quality of the Louisville Free Public Library's gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender collection.

The study implements an inductive check‐list method. Where other check‐lists compare a list to the collection, ignoring the number of items which do not appear on the list, an inductive method takes a sample of the entire collection, and compares it with several evaluative lists, demonstrating what percentage of the collection is not considered “desirable” by common evaluative lists.

The results found that 31.9 percent of the LFPL's GLBT collection can be found in the evaluative lists used. Previous inductive evaluations suggest that this number indicates a quality core GLBT collection.

A sample collection was chosen using GLBT‐related subject headings; however, evidence shows that a portion of the actual GLBT collection (perhaps as much as 37.5 percent) lack appropriate subject access control. This results in a potentially flawed sample.

This study provides public librarians with a standard by which they can evaluate their GLBT collections and their library's attempt to meet the needs of a frequently underrepresented minority.

Very few inductive evaluations have been published, and almost none has been published studying GLBT collections. The paper attempts to fill that gap, and provide a deeper standard by which GLBT collections can be evaluated.

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.

All publicly‐funded libraries have been hard hit by the government's financial policies since the early 1980s; it may be that a measure of austerity is beneficial, in that it encourages creative thought and more effective management. However in the universities, at least, the damage done to services has been significant, white collections have suffered even more. Since inflation in book and periodical prices is not fully reflected in the grants given to libraries, an effective annual reduction of 5—10 per cent is to be expected: unless this trend can be halted university libraries will no longer be able to support worthwhile research, either in the humanities or the sciences.

Library planning and collection building in the research libraries of the United States have long had to deal with two contradictory forces, autonomy and interdependence. The independence and autonomy of those libraries in providing for local self‐sufficiency in information needs have been tested by a gradual but growing realization that local self‐sufficiency is not possible for the programs of comprehensive university libraries or other large libraries. They continue to operate independently, making their own decisions for local needs, while routinely rejecting the “myth of the self‐sufficient library” and paying lip‐service to cooperation and resource sharing.