An interesting question to pose in an environment like our store is what percentage of our investment in
compiling this knowledge stock over a 150 year period has ever been used or will ever be. Also because
of being under-resourced in our retrospective cataloguing activity a very large percentage, perhaps as
much as two thirds of the Store’s stock, is not registered on the online catalogue and as such is not ide ntifiable
as part of the overall collection. So in that case is there much sense in holding onto most of this
stock? How expensive is it to store per annum? How much would it cost to catalogue it all. I don’t have
figures but the costs would be significant. So what is my point? It is that a lot of what we currently store
may be of little or no value to our scholarly community for the future. Therefore why invest in long term
storage? What is the alternative? How would the costs of long term storage and of cataloguing match up
with a digital access a lternative to those parts of the holdings identifiable as key research resources?
How much should we invest in providing for serendipitous discovery? How much should we invest in
preserving collections we regard as special? Such questions require an enlightened collections development
policy!