For decades, general services and accounting officers have been dominant forces in collection development activities in college and university libraries in Korea. The role of certified librarians has been rather peripheral. This has been allowed by the fact that library acquisitions departments had to be headed by non-librarian general administrative officers by the government regulation. The philosophy behind this regulation was that acquiring library materials was not any different from simple purchasing act of other useful goods in the marketplace. In affiliation with the element of general administrative officers, domestic book-sellers also had a great influence in collection building activities in college and university libraries in Korea. This has been made possible by the fact that no other people could su n.0, pply library materials, especially foreign library materials. It has been pointed out for years that the mechanism in which general administrative officers and domestic book-sellers had a greater say in library acquisitions activities was especially inefficient in acquiring wanted materials in wanted speed and in wanted price. In this mechanism, books and periodicals were mere goods. They were not perceived as intellectual property holding information and knowledge in them. Since the student movement to revolutionize the library system of the Pusan National University, September 1987 to December 1988, the creative and progressive elements in this university library have been making great efforts to change the acquisitions system in this library into a more efficient one by putting certified librarians at the center of the whole acquisitions process. These efforts have been successful to a certain degree. In this discursive study of the case of the Pusan National University Library, I have tried to achieve a social description of the library process in which progressively motivated librarians succeeded in alienating administrative officers and book-sellers and in grasping in their hands the hegemony in the collection building aspect of library activities. It has been discovered that this was possible only when the librarians were mature enough to have their kind of professionalism, i.e., professional ethics and craftsmanship.