The properties and characteristics of all collections within the Libraries reflect the University’s institutional mission over time, and we recognize that both general and special collections have conventionally been founded on, influenced by, and biased toward embedded cultural, societal, institutional, and educational power structures. 

Today, the Libraries’ collections are dynamic, responsive, and purposefully developed to realize the value of collections that have defined the Libraries’ strengths in the past as well as resources that have been traditionally overlooked. Collections are being shaped and continually enriched in ways that advance access to heritage materials representing varied contours of knowledge, diversity of content and languages of expression, diverse identities of creators, experiential diversity (including the creator's abilities and affinities), and cognitive diversity.

In order to successfully fulfill our service and stewardship mission, those who are charged with developing collections employ strategies for acquiring, describing, and managing resources that go beyond normative structures, collections types, and established canons. Our decisions are informed by new curricula developed to meet the needs of a diverse student body, new and emerging areas of research being conducted by a broad spectrum of researchers, including graduate students and newly-hired faculty, as well as by perspectives from the diminished or entirely lost voices of historically oppressed, marginalized, and underserved populations and communities. We apply these strategies to the general library collections, to Distinctive Collections, and to disciplines and fields of practice established at Columbia University, such as web collecting and oral history, which were founded in part on these very values and principles.

Collections decisions (acquisition, location, retention, preservation, conservation, digitization, investment in open access) are evaluated against criteria that reflect the varied, evolving, and increasingly interdisciplinary curricula and research at Columbia. Decisions balance quantitative measures for assessment (cost per use; publication date; circulation and other usage data) with qualitative measures that integrate ethical and values-based considerations by librarians in order to promote preservation of and access to the widest range of cultural, scientific, and historical resources possible.