Abstract:
This article analyzes 40 policies for the formation and development of collections made available in institutional sites of Brazilian university libraries. In the analysis, emphasis is given to the aspects related to the allocation of financial resources for the purchase of informational materials, thus seeking to surface discussions on the theme at the national level. The collection of documents was conducted t in May 2022, and the analysis occurred in the period from May to October of the same year. It was found that the step of acquisition of informational materials, with few exceptions, is presented in a very summarized way, in some cases limiting itself to informing that the acquisition can be done in the modalities of purchase, donation, and exchange. None of the documents analyzed mentioned the use of mathematical and/or statistical formulas to allocate financial resources for the purchase of informational materials. Three main situations can be noticed: documents that do not mention the allocation of financial resources for the purchase of informational materials; documents that address, in a generalized way, the allocation of financial resources for the purchase of informational materials; documents that evidence that the allocation of financial resources is not a library assignment. We conclude that in the documents analyzed, the discussions about the allocation of financial resources for the purchase of informational materials are vague and contribute little to the understanding of how these processes occur in the libraries of Brazilian federal universities.
Keywords:
collection development; document acquisition; resource allocation; library management; collection development policy