We will create documents for librarians, archivists, historians, and publishers to look at the different formats in which business information manifests itself and to write guidance for all concerned to incorporate collection and weeding practices of our business sources into open local, regional, or partnership collections.
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We need to create this guidance because managers are seeing space occupied by classic business sources as more valuable than business legacy collections and asking librarians to throw away our business research heritage. Business resources need special consideration as they are a combination of local history, data that capture moments in time, and non-scholarly “ephemeral” resources that come in many formats. They also aid in understanding provenance around the original and subsequent owners of data commonly used in business research. We need to discuss the responsibility we have as business and economics librarians to ensure that future researchers can access these seemingly transitory published sources.