The Continuing Development of Special Collections Librarianship

This essay introduces the overall subject of the present issue of Library Trends and puts into a contemporary and historical context all the pieces which follow. The authors look at the current world of special collections, showing how it has evolved and how, in many ways, issues of the past are still with us. Libraries change, in all of their capacities and departments. Special collections and archives have always presented specific challenges to those in charge of them. Those concerns have changed in many ways, but they have not disappeared. And new challenges and initiatives, new technologies, and new ways of configuring the infrastructure of the institutions which house the collections bring special collections librarians and archivists the need to stay current with the world of information management.