In the past 40 years, the development of library collections in mainland
Chinahere has made a considerable progress of fundamental importance, the
gapbetween developed countries and us in this field has been narrowed.
Theevolvement of philosophy in library collections can be seen In 4 aspects.
Firstly,the outmoded notion of collection development as "collect, collect and collect"
hasbeen replaced gradually by "select before collect" and then the new sense, that
is"books are for use." Secondary, the goal of collection development have
evolvedfrom "infinite growth" to "limited and steady increase" and even "zero
growth." Thirdly,the distribution and application of collection has been evolved from
a confined andisolated process to a open cooperated, rational distributed and
information sharingsystem. Finaly, evaluation of collections has been changed from
quantity toquality.