More than 80 chief collection development officers, representing the nation's largest research libraries, met at Cornell in October for the "Janus Conference on Research Library Collections: Managing the Shifting Ground between Writers and Readers" http://www.library.cornell.edu/janusconference.

The purpose of the conference, supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, was to review and re-envision how research library collections are built and maintained in today's rapidly changing information environment.

Twenty-five years ago, Cornell University Library (CUL) received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supporting a thorough assessment of CUL's collection development methods and values. The reports of that project had a broad influence on how CUL and other research libraries built their collections in the 1980s and 1990s. Now CUL has hosted a conference on collection development looking both backward at how research library collection development has evolved, and forward at how research collections should be developed in the new age of information.

Four key thinkers in collection development gave presentations at the conference (all were videotaped and will be available on CUL's Open Access Repository http://dspace.library.cornell.edu). Hendrik Edelman of Long Island University spoke about the evolution of collection development over the past 25 years. Mark Dimunation from the U.S. Library of Congress discussed the continuing importance of the print artifact in the new environment. Mark Sandler, University of Michigan, talked about library collections in the age of Google. And Jean-Claude Guedon, University of Montreal, considered the links between library collection building and alternative methods of scholarly publication.

Conference participants identified and discussed six key collection development challenges facing academic research libraries:

• Retrospective conversion -- the need to convert print holdings to digital form, recognizing that selected print copies must be retained.
• "Prospective" conversion -- the need to ensure that more scholarly publications are published in digital form.
• Core definition -- the need for libraries to define a core of information on each subject and to ensure that all research libraries have access to the same core.
• Publisher relations -- the need for research libraries as a group to negotiate more collectively with large publishers.
• Archiving -- the need for libraries to develop coordinated and scalable methods to maintain traditional and digital resources for the long term.
• Alternative channels for scholarly communication -- the need to work with scholars and other key players on a new publishing network that scholars can use as a supplement or alternative to standard scholarly publishing.

Six working groups were formed at the conclusion of the conference, and the results of their discussion and potential next steps will be considered at a collection development officers meeting in January at the midwinter conference of the American Library Association.