Life Cycle Collection Management

Life cycle collection management is a way of taking a long-term approach to the responsible stewardship of the British Library's collections and is one of the Library's strategic strands. It defines the different stages in a collection item's existence over time. These stages range fr...

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Main Author: Helen Shenton
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: openjournals.nl 2003-09-01
Series:Liber Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries
Online Access:https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10337
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author Helen Shenton
author_facet Helen Shenton
author_sort Helen Shenton
collection DOAJ
description Life cycle collection management is a way of taking a long-term approach to the responsible stewardship of the British Library's collections and is one of the Library's strategic strands. It defines the different stages in a collection item's existence over time. These stages range from selection and acquisitions processing, cataloguing and press marking, through to preventive conservation, storage and retrieval. Life cycle collection management seeks to identify the costs of each stage in order to show the economic interdependencies between the phases over time. It thereby aims to demonstrate the long-term consequences of what the library takes into its collections, by making explicit the financial and other implications of decisions made at the beginning of the life cycle for the next 100 plus years. This paper describes the work over the past year at the British Library on this complex and complicated subject. It presents the emerging findings and suggests how it can be used for practical reasons (by individual curators and selectors) and for economic, governance and political purposes. The paper describes the next steps in the project, for example, on a predictive data model. The British Library is seeking to benchmark itself against comparable organisations in this area. It intends to work with others on specific comparison for example, of life cycle costing of electronic and paper journals, as a prelude to eliding digital and 'traditional' formats.
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spelling doaj.art-6a10eff0bf964a28bbeb314734616d1d2024-01-11T16:07:22Zengopenjournals.nlLiber Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries2213-056X2003-09-01133-410.18352/lq.7739Life Cycle Collection ManagementHelen ShentonLife cycle collection management is a way of taking a long-term approach to the responsible stewardship of the British Library's collections and is one of the Library's strategic strands. It defines the different stages in a collection item's existence over time. These stages range from selection and acquisitions processing, cataloguing and press marking, through to preventive conservation, storage and retrieval. Life cycle collection management seeks to identify the costs of each stage in order to show the economic interdependencies between the phases over time. It thereby aims to demonstrate the long-term consequences of what the library takes into its collections, by making explicit the financial and other implications of decisions made at the beginning of the life cycle for the next 100 plus years. This paper describes the work over the past year at the British Library on this complex and complicated subject. It presents the emerging findings and suggests how it can be used for practical reasons (by individual curators and selectors) and for economic, governance and political purposes. The paper describes the next steps in the project, for example, on a predictive data model. The British Library is seeking to benchmark itself against comparable organisations in this area. It intends to work with others on specific comparison for example, of life cycle costing of electronic and paper journals, as a prelude to eliding digital and 'traditional' formats.https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10337
spellingShingle Helen Shenton
Life Cycle Collection Management
Liber Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries
title Life Cycle Collection Management
title_full Life Cycle Collection Management
title_fullStr Life Cycle Collection Management
title_full_unstemmed Life Cycle Collection Management
title_short Life Cycle Collection Management
title_sort life cycle collection management
url https://liberquarterly.eu/article/view/10337
work_keys_str_mv AT helenshenton lifecyclecollectionmanagement