The Language of the Levels: Reflections on the Communication of Collection Development Policy

Abstract

The collection development policy, as a means to express and systematise guidelines for collection building, fulfills 3 basic functions: the referential, the generative, and the rhetorical. The division of the policy into subject categories, and the use of 'collection levels' to rank the collection and the collecting effort for each subject, serves these functions well. More work needs to be done, however, on defining collection levels and the collecting effort to which they refer.