Is the Internet (online ordering and access to information) shaping collection development practices?
In particular, it’s dramatically changed the way we find out about new publications and the way we communicate with publishers and vendors. The Internet doesn’t do everything better than a traditional library does, but one thing that it does vastly better than a library is provide access to information about the publishing marketplace. I was a student employee in the university library at Brigham Young University before the advent of the Web, and I used to spend my lunch hours in the music reference stacks, looking for record label addresses in the business directories. It was awful — the directories were incomplete and inaccurate, and they were out of date the moment they were published. And of course none of them had email addresses or websites, so the only way I could communicate with a label was by phone or letter. I was in a constant state of frustration. That situation sounds like ancient history now, but it was only fifteen years ago! Now I contact labels and publishers with a
