ABSTRACT
Despite numerous cooperative collection development endeavors, the building of library collections has remained a highly individual and local practice. The physicality of bound volumes has posed a distinct limitation on our ability to share collections, although libraries have made huge strides in recent years. Electronic resources and the ability to digitize our physical holdings offer the potential to redirect our investments in collection building to the creation of a global network that would serve an international community of scholars. By facilitating the creation of discipline-based portals to knowledge resources, librarians can channel their efforts to the benefit of many without sacrificing the quality of local relationships. To accomplish this, libraries need to develop collectively built and managed Web sites that supplant the need for autonomous, selector-created “webliographies” and that greatly expand the number of sources that can be identified and described. Selectors, freed of the individual responsibility to shoulder the increasingly heavy and ultimately unsustainable load of tracking a proliferation of resources in a variety of formats and states of publication, can turn their attention to the capture of more elusive, but important, material; to more detailed evaluation of the use of information resources; toward improvements in the user interface of portals; or toward the transformation of scholarly communication, with the discipline-based portal serving as a magnet for attracting new forms of scholarly thought and research. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <getinfo@ haworthpressinc.com> Website: <https://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2002 by Tlie Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
