Abstract: Ross Atkinson, "Six Key Challenges for the Future of Collection Development: Introduction for the Janus Breakout Sessions," Library Resources & Technical Services 50, no. 4 (2006): 244-51.

Ross Atkinson had a long and distinguished career in collection development for academic libraries. At the time of his death earlier this year, he worked for Cornell University, and had organized the "Janus Conference: A Look Backward and Forward at Collection Development," of which this was one of the major addresses. There is a streaming video of Ross's presentation at http://libdev.library.cornell.edu/glopad_test/tests/RA/RA_video.htm . The six key challenges for collection development have been talked about and worked on since his presentation at this and other conferences and in other library organizations. He outlines three reasons for collecting information:

• Political and economic: institutional capital. We collect to differentiate the quality of the educational experience students receive at a particular institution. Atkinson believes that worries about growing homogeneity of collections are really unfounded, as the varying paths to accessing that information will inevitably differ from one library to the next.
• Material: preservation. Long-term access, cultural memory. Problems include technological limitations of digital preservation, and the increasing access instead of ownership mentality of many academic disciplines.
• Contextual: privileging. Inclusion of materials in library collections is a process of deciding which information resources are more important than others, and effort to bring this information to the library historically meant making access to this information easier for the patron. Now, with digital delivery and free availability of many information resources online, print collections in libraries are less accessible, turning the privileging system on its head.

These motivations for collecting beget issues affecting the activity of collecting in the current economic, political, and social world of academic communication. It was Ross's goal that identifiying these six challenges would also result in significant action:

1. action to digitize collections in a great retrospective conversion effort,
2. to make a rapid transition to electronic information by demanding scholarly publishers to deliver their content in this format,
3. to develop deeply coordinated and integrated collections by creating core lists and dividing out advanced, peripheral subjects,
4. to negotiate collectively with publishers for the best and most cost-effective access to electronic publications,
5. to ensure the long-term archiving of digital materials for the sake of cultural preservation, and
6. to support alternative modes of scholarly communication to circumvent the stranglehold some publishers have on libraries (think Elsevier).

I liked this article because I could tell that Atkinson was putting everything he cared about out for others to see and scrutinize, and for its high level of informed insight into the profession by one of its great luminaries. Atkinson's adventurous spirit is evident in some of his recommendations to challenge legality of collective collection development and the implicit challenge to copyright through such activities as recon digitization of print materials and archiving of subscribed digital content to ensure future access.