COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICY :
	views on an academic library

1. INTRODUCTION
	Libraries are about getting people and information together and librarians are concerned that they are not succeeding in their job. There are many reasons for this. Most of them, which are universal and apply in libraries all over the world, librarians can control and identify at the different areas under the following headings :
- services
- library staff
- condition of library
- collections
	Students come to the library want reading material for their courses, preferably many copies. They want to be able to : consult books in the library - read more widely later in their course or writing thesis- borrow them and make copies. The library collections are of course central to the library's effectiveness. Library may fail users if the collections are inadequate and they cannot find what they want.
	Lecturers use the library to get books from which to prepare lectures and to get up-to-date information in their area of research. Building up a research collection costs a lot of money - lectures need large number of books and current journal subscriptions in their subject area. Journals are expensive : they are a continuing expense and the costs keep raising. 
	No library can hope to acquire all the materials which its lectures and students need, because of its limited budget. In this case librarians and other decision makers are examined to make a policy on collection development. It is obviously that they should spend the limited budget wisely in order to cover the materials for each department needs.
	This paper does not discuss all the above identifications which may fail the library, but it   focuses on the collection area, or in other words it emphasises on the collection development policy.

2. Library and Its Community

	Many persons are not fully aware of a library's role, they tend to think of it only as a place to come to get a book, magazine or journal, and perhaps, other materials. They don't think the range of services that the modern library makes available to its community : providing information that they want, regarding of its format or location, answering to various questions that they may have. Indeed, every librarian knows that as the reason for the existence of the library and librarian.
	As the mentioned above, library's collection is central to the library's effectiveness. The library's collection is aimed to provide what the community needs and wants. It is clear that librarians must know something about their users to function effectively. But just what kind of information they must have, and to what degree it must be developed are the problem which are not easy to be solved. In this case, librarians' intelligent are also examined to supply materials for their users.
	According to G. Edward Evans1 library may be divided into four major types : academic, public, school, and special. One library is different of its collections from another. It will depend on its type which has a specific population  and the size of users to serve; materials must be collected and preserved in a form suitable for patrons use. And, of course, they must be organised in a certain designed to help the users to find what is wanted as fast as possible. These are the basic functions, the differences  among the  various library types as a result both of the different categories of users served in each and of limits set by a governing body on the services that they library may provide.

3. Academic Library's Role

	Louis Round Wilson and Maurice F. Tauber2 say :
adequate resources for carrying out the university's objectives in instruction, research, and extension implement the function of preserving the accumulating source materials necessary for scholarly pursuits. 
From this point of views the role of the university library can be interpreted to attempt to build a collection to support the curriculum ( teaching and learning process ). The range of subjects will support the training of undergraduate,  program of graduate level, and also  graduate research. Furthermore, the university library is ordinary committed heavily to support faculty and university research. For these, they then suggest the library must provide the bibliographical apparatus, books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, film, and other materials necessary to these goals. In another part they  added the library's collection should constantly contribute the various phases of the institution's work and support programs in such additional a new course, a new department, or, even a new institution.

4. Collection Development Policy in An Academic Library

4.1. The Term and  Its Meaning
	Edward Evans3 defines the term  "collection development" as the process of assessing the strengths and weaknesses in a collection, and then creating a plan to correct the weaknesses and maintain the strengths. He added the collection development policy is a "written statement" of that plan, providing details for the guidance of the library staff. As a written statement, of course, the collection development policy is a document. It must consist of plan of action and information which is used to guide the librarians in thinking and decision making when they want to develop the library's collection. In addition, this document should be also consulted when librarians are deciding in what subject areas should be purchased and how much emphasis each area should get.
	Without a written statement many different views on the collection development may occur, because  the collection development works involve a number of persons from the various departments. Take an example for this, the Department of Economic which greatly interests in economics books  buys lot of titles, while the Agricultural Faculty also develop its subject on economics. From this example, the duplication of titles may happen and it, of course, wastes the budget. Therefore, according to Evans, the functions of a policy statement are :
- help to achieve a unified view of what areas of the collection should be developed,
- help to develop coordination between different individuals responsible for the collection,
- help to achieve a consistency in collection,
- help to reduce the number of committee decisions, 
- help to avoid confusion in the minds of selectors and patrons as to what the collection is and is not.

4.2. Type of Works in Collection Development 
	The statement that should be involved in a collection development policy are about handling : donated materials, weeding, complaints and library cooperation.

4.2.1. Donated materials
	No items comes free to be a library collection, although it is donated item. It still need to be processed in the same manner as a purchased material. But, it will waste time, energy, and even a little budget for this processing when it is not essential used. Thus it is important for librarian to handle wisely the items coming through gifts.

4.2.2. Weeding
	Weeding is very important in a library when it does not want to become permanent depositories of all materials that have been published. It should be a regular, continuing and steady process in library. To do this, Carter4 suggests the categories of books which are obviously candidates for weeding :
- the duplicates of titles, purchased when the books were in heavier demands, but then are not longer used,
- old editions, when the new one has already come and the library is not attempting a historical collections of all the editions of a given title,
- books that become dirty, shabby or plain worn out,
- books that have become obsolete in content, style or theme

4.2.3. Complaints
	The major problem that can save time and trouble in the collection development policy is handling complaints about the collection. Librarians may face a few complaints about what is or is not in their collection. It will also deal with the question as to why the policy says what it does. To answer such questions the committee decision can and should review the document policy, because its elements  is based on the community's demands.

4.2.4. Cooperation With Other Libraries
	From day to day libraries try to improve their services, a good one is providing the services that the users need - quickly, efficiently, accurately and on time. No library, however, today can has everything that the community wants. It may be the limited budget to be the main problem. And, of course, libraries fail if they act insolation and think that they can provide information only from their own collections.
	To overcome the limitation of collections, the library should open the best services to users bay sharing the collections with other libraries and calling on them for resources that the users need. This can be achieve :
- by sharing cataloguing data and hence information about book and journal holdings,
- by sharing information about the strengths of the collection,
- by accessing the catalogues and databases,
- by sending books or  photocopies of articles. 
All this is possible through networks. A network is two or more people exchange information or giving each other support. Networks can be face-to-face, by mail, phone, fax or computer.
	In the case of computers, a network could be all the computers in one library being able to talk to each other. It could be all computers in the University able to talk to each other. Networks can be very large, for example, AARNet  which links all the Australian University in the USA, Europe and Britain. It also lets users consult database in other universities and join discussion group.

5. Conclusion

	Collection development policy is a complex work. It must survey the community demands or needs, process the data, make the decision, and evaluate what it has achieved with the document. It also involves a number of library staff, a number from different departments which is, probably, bringing their own suggestions in the collection development of their own subject.
	No library can achieve the goals by its own collection. Sharing is suggested to overcome the weaknesses.

REFERENCES

Carter, Mary Duncan, Wallace John Bonk and Rose Mary Magrill. Building library collections. 4th ed. Metuchen N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974.
Curley, A. and D. Broderick. Building library collections. 6th ed. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1985.
Evans, G. Edward. Developing library & information center collection. 2nd ed. Littleton, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1987.
4. Wilson, Louis Round and Maurice F. Tauber. The University library:         the organization, administration, and fuctions of academic library. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956.
Library acquisition policies and procedures. Edited by Elizabeth Futas. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1977.