This article explores recent developments in national policy for academic libraries. It considers the shift from traditional to managerial academic librarianship; the move to "social space" and multi-use systems; changes in the balance between meeting teaching and research needs and in public funding priorities; the difficulty of making decisions about moving to electronic resources and saving space in holdings of paper copies; the consequences of the policies of "deduplication" and disposal of "surplus" copies; "aggregation" of library with other functions; the impact of the Open Access policy.