Looking Back at the 1980s: A Dismal Decade for Building Collections

For those whose job it is to obtain material for library collections, the last decade has surely been one of the most frustrating in living memory. A number of unfortunate trends that were evident as the '80s began grew more serious as the decade wore on; some became nearly disastrous for those involved in library collection building. The net result was that acquiring materials, which has become more of a pain each year for at least the last 20, is, at the end of the 1980s, not much better than a multi‐million‐dollar crapshoot.