ABSTRACT
Collection and preservation of the world’s research and literature has been a core mission of libraries from time immemorial but the specific challenges and opportunities faced by libraries in pursuing this mission have changed regularly throughout history. For ARL (Association of Research Libraries) libraries whose necessary historical context extends from the founding of the European colonies in North America to the present postmillennial era, the collection issues arrange themselves into five key periods. Beginning with the largely ad hoc collections of the colonial period, then transformed by the German research model and land grant mission, research collections entered a triumphal period exploding in size and support after World War II. Even success had its problems, however, as concerns about storage and the discovery of acid-based paper demonstrate. The following era of digital revolution brought its own challenges and opportunities for collections—first in using automation as a tool to deal with massive print collections and then, after the millennium, with automation increasingly providing the format of the collection itself. Most significantly, however, while the story of ARL library collection development may be better documented and their issues more widely discussed than those of other academic libraries, the fundamental collection development issues illustrated by ARL libraries are to a great extent the underlying story of all North American research collections.
