Curating Collective Collections —Shared Print and the Book as Artifact Part 2

摘要

Introduction In the February 2016 (v.28#l) installment of this column I argued that the condition of circulating books in academic libraries should be used as a "criterion when we consider which copies we should retain and which we should deselect to create shared print collections." I suggested this idea probably isn't too controversial to the extent that most librarians probably prefer to retain those book-copies whose boards aren't falling off, for example, or whose pages haven't been ravaged by any of the various enemies of books. However, I also made a somewhat more polemical proposal, arguing that because the books in any shared print collection "will have to be all things to future researchers, including researchers interested in books as primary documents and artifacts," general collections librarians ought to expand their definition of condition such that it aligns more closely with what their colleagues in special collections have in mind when they use this term. In short, if we're going to get rid of a bunch of duplicates, I argued, we ought to make certain that the one(s) we keep for posterity are the most "artifactually complete" copies in a group, by which I meant those copies closest to a book's as-published state.