Why the distributed national collection won’t be coming to a library near you Available to Purchase

Research libraries in the UK are considering the development of a highly developed form of collaborative purchasing for print material, the distributed national collection. The distributed national collection may have the potential to deliver benefits to libraries and their users, but there are a number of problems that will hinder the implementation of such a programme. The most significant of these are the attitudes to collaborative collecting held by some senior library managers, which emphasise collection goals that are short term and local at the expense of longer‐term national goals.