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.