Life Cycle Collection Management

Abstract

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.