Collections development refers to the practice of adding items to the collection of a library, and collections management refers to what happens to these items after they join (Johnson, 2018). These terms encompass diverse activities from deciding the scope of a collection to a policy for de-selection (or ‘weeding’). Practice will vary between special, academic, corporate, and public libraries, and which regulatory jurisdiction they fall under. Collections practice also changes through time, as technology, ideology, communities and economic conditions all fluctuate. In this essay, I discuss changes in collections development and management in the last 25 years, with a focus on UK public libraries. I evaluate these against the statement that the concept and processes of collections practice are, as we enter 2020, “unrecognisable” from those in the late 1990s. I examine these changes in three sections: paradigm shifts in library practice, as driven by the Internet revolution; economic changes that have affected libraries during this period; and the social changes in the communities public libraries serve. In reality all these factors work together and affect one another in a way that cannot be neatly unpicked.