Collection & Resources Development Policy Overview

Purposes

The Collection & Resources Development Policy sets out the principles and guidelines that provide the foundation for developing the State Collection. The policy aims to:

• guide the development of the State Collection according to an agreed set of principles
• make public and transparent the collecting guidelines of the Library
• provide library users, other libraries and the public of Victoria with a statement on the collecting principles employed by the Library
• provide library staff with guidelines to assist with selection of materials for the collections.

This document groups collecting policies under the Library’s eight main collections. Each collection includes descriptions of major subject areas and sub-collections. The collections are:

Arts
Australian History & Literature
Australian Manuscripts
Genealogy
Newspapers
Pictures
Rare Printed
Redmond Barry

The collecting principles that impact on all the collections are outlined in the section on General Collecting Principles. Related policies and excerpts of relevant legislation appear in the Appendixes.

Building the State Collection

The collection-building responsibilities of the State Library of Victoria are outlined in the Libraries Act 1988 [external link]. The Act charges the Board of the State Library of Victoria with responsibility to ensure:

• the maintenance, preservation and development of a State Collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Victoria and the people of Victoria
  
• that library material in the State Collection is available to such persons and institutions, and in such manner and subject to such conditions, as the Board determines with a view to the most advantageous use of the State Collection.

The State Collection is further developed by the provisions in the Act that relate to legal deposit, requiring Victorian publishers to lodge copies of their publications with the Library. This makes the Library the major repository for Victorian publications and ensures that it is both a significant collection strength and a collecting focus.

The Library’s vision statement gives further emphasis to the collecting responsibilities of the Library:

'Victorians will have ready access to a comprehensive collection of Victorian documentary material and to worldwide information resources to enrich their cultural, educational, social and economic lives'.

Victorian and Australian collections

Appropriately, the Library directs much of its collecting efforts to acquiring Victorian and Australian material. Collection strengths include:

• Victorian publications collections acquired on legal deposit
• items that are either published in Australia, substantially about Australia, or written by an Australian author, held in the Australian History & Literature Collection and the Redmond Barry Collection
• original materials collections (the Pictures Collection and the Australian Manuscripts Collection)
• rare printed materials collections (the Australian Rare Books Collection, the Children’s Literature and Research Collection and the Maps Collection)
• the Australian component of the Newspaper Collection
• ephemera collections (the Australian Art and Artists File, the Theatre Programmes Collection, and the Riley and Ephemera Collection) which are all predominantly Victorian, with some broader Australian content as well
• significant collections of government publications aided by longstanding deposit arrangements with the Victorian Government, the Commonwealth Government and other governments in Australia.

Overseas collections

The Library’s overseas collections include many strengths. The M. V. Anderson Chess Collection is renowned worldwide. The Rare Book Collection contains many fine examples of books that illustrate the history of printing and the book. The Arts Collection holds notable works on fine arts, music and performing arts. Other overseas materials of significance in the Redmond Barry Collection include World War I material and military regimental histories, historical scientific works notably in botany, geology and ornithology, and government publications from around the world. The Library also has extensive holdings of 19th- and early 20th-century British and international journals on all subjects.

PANDORA

With the emergence of the internet, new digital collecting opportunities are continually presenting themselves. The Library participates in a partnership known as PANDORA, with the National Library of Australia and most other Australian state libraries, to gather and archive digital publications and websites available on the internet. The Library concentrates on collecting Victorian digital publications, thus adding a new collection strength to the Library’s collections.

Impact of the digital age

As part of its forward planning the Library has developed a package of strategic initiatives that will give greater emphasis to the digital information world. Known as slv21, the strategy recognises that advances in technology mean that people are accustomed to getting information quickly, when and how they want. The Library’s response to these expectations will be to increase the availability of digital resources, offer greater digital access to its collections and provide Victorians with an expanded gateway to the global information world.

There are several implications of this shift in direction for the development of the collections:

• Collection development is no longer just about ownership but also about providing access. The Library cannot have physical ownership of all the information resources it makes available to Library users. The Library recognises that it must provide access, often via costly subscriptions, to digital resources that it does not own or control.
• The concept of readership level, or the type of user that the Library has in mind when developing the collections, is no longer very meaningful. Because of finite resources the Library has always targeted its collecting to various readership levels. (These are outlined on the Collecting Levels page. )However with the advent of digital databases it is no longer necessary or possible to do this. Digital resources present the Library with the possibility of broadening its appeal to a much wider group of potential users.
• Many information resources are available in both hard-copy and digital form and the Library is presented with choices about which format to purchase. Where materials are available in both print and digital formats the digital format will be preferred, with the exception that the Library will continue to collect all formats of Victorian publications in compliance with its legal deposit obligations. Naturally the preference for digital formats must be weighed against cost, long-term access and technological infrastructure requirements, but wherever practicable the Library will prefer digital versions.