New Professions, New Opportunities

This chapter is focused on how academic librarians have responded to the information needs of interdisciplinary programs. A review of literature of both American higher education and academic libraries is provided as a context for understanding current needs and collection development techniques. These techniques include the development of core book and journal lists, citation analysis, citation scatter analysis, the use of ontologies, and creative approaches to collection budgeting. The results of a survey of collection development librarians are presented, which identify current practices when dealing with interdisciplinary programs developed in recent years and the budget issues that either facilitate or present obstacles to the development of interdisciplinary library collections.