Special Collections in Research Libraries: Problems and Perspectives

Abstract

‘Special collections’ may comprise rare books, manuscripts, institutional archives, maps and other non-book collections in a library, but the types of groupings are not consistent across different types of library nor across countries. The humanities researcher clearly has a need for material in special collections. Funds for acquisitions and staff are becoming increasingly short at a time when information technology offers new possibilities of accessing and exploiting special collections, including collections held in other libraries and countries. Much progress has been made, especially with automated short-title catalogues; other useful steps include the implementation by the Research Libraries Group in the US of the newly developed MARC format for archives and manuscripts control in the Research Libraries Network and the adoption by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe of a recommendation on retroconversion. Most of the activity so far is, however, neither well co-cordinated nor adequately resourced. One practical approach might be for European libraries and other repositories to consider the potential for a Latin-language database to be set up with the advice of ‘users’ and potential host-database holders.