As the network continues to reconfigure personal, business, and institutional relationships, it is natural that we also continue to see changes in how library collections are managed: changes in focus, boundaries, and value. One important trend is that libraries and the organizations that provide services to them will devote more attention to system-wide organization of collections--whether the "system" is a consortium, a region, or a country. Recently, print collections have also been the subject of such shared attention. Libraries are beginning to evolve arrangements that will facilitate long-term shared management of the print literature as individual libraries begin to manage down their local capacity. The collective collection has been a major interest of OCLC Research. This is to be expected given the data in WorldCat about collective library holdings and OCLC's goal to make shared working among libraries more efficient. As interest in coordinated management of the collective print collection grows, OCLC thought it was a useful time to pull together some of OCLC's writings on this topic in a single volume. This short piece provides an environmental introduction for the contributions in the report, "Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-Wide Perspective on Library Print Collections" (Dempsey et al. 2013). [This paper is from the OCLC Research report, "Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-Wide Perspective on Library Print Collections" (2013).]