by HELEN SHENTON

INTRODUCTION

Life cycle collection management is a way of taking a long-term approach to the
responsible stewardship of the collections of the British Library and is one of the
library’s strategic strands. It defines the different stages in a collection item’s existence
over time, ranging from selection and acquisitions processing, through to conservation,
storage and retrieval. Life cycle collection management seeks to identify the costs of
each stage in order to show the economic interdependencies between the phases over
time. It thereby aims to demonstrate the long-term consequences of what the library
takes into its collections, by making explicit the financial and other implications of
decisions made at the beginning of the life cycle for the next 100 plus years.

Eventually it aims to combine the life cycle of both paper and digital collections, in order
to reflect the totality of the British Library’s hybrid collections.

The paper covers the following areas on the first year of the life cycle collection
management project:
• What is it?
• Why do it?
• Who might use it and how can it be used?
• What has been done so far?
• What findings are emerging?
• What is going to be done?

Download the paper here

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