“Get It, Catalog It, Promote It”: New Challenges to Providing Access to Special Collections

Abstract

It is becoming a cliché to state that as research library collections become more homogenous—through the consolidation of purchasing (such as widespread availability of the same electronic serials) and through the increase in digital content accessible to library users regardless of institutional affiliation—special collections will be what sets apart one library from another. This prediction has become so common that it even figures in published library satires.1 Administrators seem to be hearing this message as well. In his plenary address at the 2005 RBMS Preconference, Steven E. Smith, Director of the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas . . .