Building and maintaining a numeric data collection

This paper describes a set of collection development strategies for use in the identification, evaluation and selection of numeric data resources. It addresses three primary issues: the delineation of collecting scope and organisational role; the identification of potentially relevant data resources; and the evaluation of those resources in accordance with objective, systematic criteria. The policies outlined here can be applied to both print and digital resources, including machine-readable data files, reference books, graphs and charts, genetic sequence data, and geospatial (GIS) files. The paper concludes with a discussion of unresolved issues in the acquisition and archiving of numeric data files.