The Origins of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science

FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING OF LIBRARY SERVICES: THE BEGINNINGS

ederal involvement with libraries was a welcome development that appeared relatively late in our Nation's history. Responsibility for libraries, like responsibility for education, was not specfically allocated to the Federal Government under the Constitution and so was left to the jurisdiction of state and local governments. Congress established the Library of Congress in 1800, and gradually the Federal Government established other libraries of its own. The Office of Education entered the library arena in the late 1860's; in 1876 it published the first major Federal report on libraries, and from that time on it has continued to collect and disseminate library statistics.

The first proposal for the development of a Federal program of aid to libraries was introduced at the 1931 American Library Asssociation conference. It sought $100 million over a ten-year period to be administered by the states to improve rural library services. However, the proposal was never carried forward. Three years later future Federal involvement with libraries was forecast in the report, "A National Plan for Libraries," endorsed by the American Library Association Council in 1934. It called for "nationwide leadership in the library movement through a library agency associated with other agencies responsible for general educational, cultural and recreational activities," whose functions should be "to forward the development of library service in cooperation with the states and with other Federal agencies: to foster inter-state library cooperation in the interest of improving the educational, cultural, and recreational facilities available to all the people; to foster such nationwide coordination and division of

Passage of the Library Services and Construction Act in 1964.

repsonsibility among national, university and other research libraries as will tend to make the materials of scholarship... available to people in parts of the country; to collect and make surveys and studies in the library field; to administer Federal aid to libraries if and when such aid is made available."

Grants from the New Deal's Works Progress Administration showed libraries that Federal support could help them accomplish special projects, such as research guides, indexes and union lists, which they had been unable to initiate under limited local funding. Federal involvement with libraries was further reinforced by a 1936 Congressional authorization creating a small Library Services Division in the Office of Education with a budget of $25 thousand. Oriented toward public libraries, it functioned as a study and investigatory unit and was largely concerned with the collection and distribution of statistics.

The 1934 ALA "National Plan for Libraries" had also anticipated that the Federal Government would take on the role of providing grants to help equalize the provision of library services among the states. Federal assistance finally became a reality in 1956, when the passage of the Library Services Act introduced Federal aid to the states for the development and expansion of public libraries in rural areas. The Act was expanded in 1964 to include urban libraries and library construction, and again in 1966 to include interlibrary cooperation and library services to institutions and the handicapped.

In his statement to accompany the signing of the Library Services and Construction Act Amendments on July 20, 1966, President Johnson asked, "Are our Federal efforts to assist libraries intelligently administered-or are they too fragmented among separate programs and agencies?" I will soon name a national library commission of distinguished citizens and experts. Its job will be to point toward an effective and efficient library system for the future. It can provide a national perspective on the problems that confront our nations' libraries." This marked the first concrete expression of the need to develop comprehensive national library policies.

In 1968 Richard K. Burns, in a report on the National Advisory Commission on Libraries, outlined some of the events leading up to the decision to create a national commission to begin developing such a comprehensive policy: "Late in 1958, the President's Science Advisory Committee issued a report calling attention to, among other things, the inundation of the scientific world with information and the inadequate means for making it readily available to researchers. Soon after his inauguration, President Kennedy's advisors began inquiring into the program and adequacy of the nation's libraries.

"The apparent keystone in the establishment of a national investigative committee was set in place in 1962. Senator Pell, a member of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress, requested Douglas W. Bryant, Associate Director of the Harvard University Library, to prepare a memorandum on 'what the Library of Congress does and what it ought to do for the government and nation generally.' The Bryant memorandum went on to describe not only the program of the Library of Congress but of related agencies, and to speculate on how the Federal library program should be administered.... Early in 1963, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Special Assistant to the President, called together a group of library officials, officials of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), legislators, and experts in education and research. Some members of the subsequent commission were invited. The major proposal set before that assembly was a plan for creating such a commission. There was encouraging hope in the Executive Mansion at this time for such a commission. But President