All libraries face the problem of controlling collection growth. Large collections make the task of preservation more difficult. Given the growth in the number of materials published every year, lack of storage space threatens to become worse.

Research libraries build collections to serve the research and teaching needs of their respective institutions, thus the larger the pool of available resources the better. But even though more titles are published in electronic form every year, there seems to be no slackening in the production of paper and print. Because acquisitions budgets grow much more slowly than the cost of new publications, individual libraries actually cover less of their dedicated subject areas while acquiring more titles and running out of space.

Below is an outline of some of the topics covered in this section.