ABSTRACT
The importance to the research library of coherent collection development policies and of a working conservation program, has been expressed with increasing regularity and vigor by library literature over the last several years. While the literature of collection development has, in the past, been concerned mainly with the selection process, there has been an increasing emphasis of late, on managerial strategies applied to the existing collections. This change of emphasis may be attributed to many factors, from budgetary constraints to librarian enlightenment, but increasing collection size and diminishing shelf space seems to be the chief motivating factor. There is a growing realization that the policies of the past, which assumed unlimited collection growth and extolled sheer collection size as a desirable virtue, can be sustained no longer. There is a clear evidence that continual and unrestricted growth causes logistical and financial problems for space and processing costs, and leads to inconvenience and intellectual problems for readers. 1
