This paper will examine the way in which libraries are stewards of collections—the ways in which they help maintain the integrity of a collection, preserve its existence, and ensure that it is in some way made accessible to researchers. Throughout this paper, reference will be made to a variety of collections in libraries where the author has worked. These references are made not necessarily to illustrate best (or indeed worst) practices, but to help describe the difficulties that libraries sometimes encounter as stewards of collections. This paper poses several questions to librarians and to scholars, chief amongst them, ‘when is a collection no longer a collection?’ The collections dealt with in this paper are primarily book collections.

Presentation of a paper presented at the Collection Thinking Conference, Concordia University, June 12-14 2018. This paper will examine the way in which libraries are stewards of collections—the ways in which they help maintain the integrity of a collection, preserve its existence, and to ensure that it is in some way made accessible to researchers. I’m going to talk about how libraries treat collections, and a little about why they do so. I will present four examples of collections that are held by libraries where I have worked, each of which fulfils a different definition of what a collection is and how it interacts with the larger library collection.

This poster describes the process by which librarians at the University of California, Irvine have collected, cleaned and used bibliographic data (which normally lives in the library’s catalog) in order to perform a large-scale assessment project on their collections.

UC Irvine migrated to Alma/Primo VE in late summer 2018. Shortly thereafter a small team was charged with examining the use of tags in the discovery layer. Tags enable library employees and patrons to emphasize aspects of records that are often overlooked or simply not included in the course of cataloging. Much of the opportunity lies in highlighting aspects of diversity within the library’s collection.

This poster describes the process by which librarians at the University of California, Irvine have collected, cleaned and used bibliographic data (which normally lives in the library’s catalog) in order to perform a large- scale assessment project on their collections.