The Digital Age has brought us opportunities and challenges. Most library services face attacks from those who believe that we are no longer needed as ‘everything is on the internet’. We face challenges from governments who in the light of economic uncertainty fail to see value in public libraries. We face challenges from students whose fee regimes imbue them with entitlement aggression about what a library can and should do for them.

Yet we know that our work in developing collections is important to preserve the past, support the present and plan for the future. Our fundamental responsibilities in collection development have not changed, but our methods have.

One hundred years ago in 1911 the British Library of Political Science (now the LSE Library) reported that in six months it had received and made available 29,287 books; a rate which the Librarian noted was twice that of the British Museum (now the British Library). In those times the Librarian would go out and search for materials. Sidney and Beatrice Webb came back from the USA laden with library materials, an agreement to an exchange of publications with Columbia University and a dislike of ice cream.

Building the collection was paramount, but despite vaulting ambitions no collection could ever cover everything. It was probably never possible, even in ancient Nineveh to bring together all recorded knowledge. We cannot hope to do this in the 21st century, but we do need to develop clear policies on what we will collect and maintain for future generations. Collections on library shelves or in remote physical storage must now be mirrored by storage and preservation of the digital. We must make policy in consultation with those we serve but also have an eye to the future. It may sometimes seem like a thankless task but future generations will thank us. Equally we must decide when we need to do the procuring and when we can pass basic work to others. Finally, and this horrifies some library users, we need to know how to weed out unwanted stock.

This book stands on the shoulders of previous texts, notably Jenkins and Morley's Collection Management in Academic Libraries (second edition 1999) and Clayton and Gorman's Managing Information Resources in Libraries: collection management in theory and practice (2001).