Collection Management Principles

November 2013

As the information landscape becomes increasingly digital and as collaborative agreements for shared retention and preservation become the norm for both print and digital resources, we will seize these opportunities to evolve fundamentally different approaches to providing information to meet the teaching, learning, and research needs of our faculty and students. Our focus, as always, will be on connecting members of our community to content they need to successfully achieve their goals at the time they need it. As a consequence of these opportunities and this focus and in acknowledgement of our limited space and fiscal resources, the content of our collections will be dynamic, rapidly changing in response to the community’s needs with a preference for access rather than ownership.

Using state-of-the-art discovery systems, we will provide and promote the broadest range of information resources as possible through a shifting combination of purchase, lease, linking, and delivery focused on the academic mission of the university. These systems will enable users to effectively select among the abundance of resources those that meet their specific information needs.

As responsible stewards, our purchase, license, or delivery decisions will be guided by an assessment of frequency of use and the prospects for immediate access as well as core values such as universal accessibility, ability to share resources with partners, support for open access initiatives, unencumbered onsite access by any user, and ongoing assessment of utility and value. In addition, we will seek collaborative partners for discovery, purchase, access, and preservation, whenever possible, in order to leverage our funding and use our space effectively. The OSU Libraries will consult with campus partners as needed on the range of content offered to our users for discovery.

Specific policies and practices to implement these principles will be developed as needed and made explicit to all stakeholders. These will change over time as user needs, the publishing environment, collaborative agreements, and the economics of information evolve.

The principles above apply to the general collections, in all formats, and not to special collections and archives nor currently to government documents governed by Oregon’s Shared Housing Agreement.