Participation with Other Organizations The Commission continues to work closely with other federal agencies involved with libraries and information services. Aside from the fact that the Librarian of Congress serves as a member of the Commission, a number of NCLIS activities have involved a strong working relationship with the Network Development Office at the Library of Congress. Another active and continuing relationship is with the Office of Libraries and Learning Resources (OLLR) of the U.S. Office of Education (USOE). At a meeting of the Commission during the past year, the Director of OLLR briefed the Commissioners and exchanged ideas on the programs now administered by the Office. As has been noted elsewhere in this report, support for standardization efforts has been jointly coordinated with the National Science Foundation (NSF). Continuing staff contact is also maintained at appropriate levels with staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Federal Library Committee (FLC), the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE), and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the Department of Commerce. Beyond this, joint support has been continued on behalf of the Committee for the Coordination of National Bibliographic Control (CCNBC) together with the Council on Library Resources (CLR) and NSF. And during this year the Commission undertook to strengthen its relation with the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) by supporting the establishment of its office on Universal Availability of Publications (UAP). The UAP office will greatly enhance the quality of information services in underdeveloped countries. The Commission continued as well to maintain official liaison with most of the major professional societies in the library and information field. These include the American Library Association (ALA), The American Society for Information Science (ASIS), the Special Libraries Association (SLA), the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). These are only a few of the many organizations with which the Commission has held valuable discussions over the past year. The Coming Year A number of activities will occupy the attention of the Commission during the coming year. Undoubtedly the most important of these will be final preparations for the White House Conference. The Conference provides a singular opportunity to gain perspective and to foresee new directions for library and information services. The Conference will identify some very important policy alternatives for consideration by the President and subsequently by the Congress. The Commission intends to ensure that the Conference is a complete success. The Conference will be both a beginning and an end. It will mark the end of the careful process of gathering constructive new ideas from citizens throughout the country, but it will mark the very important beginning of an endeavor to implement those ideas. What will emerge will no doubt shape library and information services in a more effective way for years to come. The Commission looks forward to active participation in that crucial implementation process as well. In addition to its White House Conference work, the Commission will proceed with its regular activities. These will include the establishment of new task forces to look at some problems of particular importance. The first of these will be a Task Force on Public/ Private Sector Relations which, among other things, will explore the delicate and sometimes fragile interaction between the government and the private sector as it relates to information production and dissemination practices. A task force on Access to Monographs is also expected to be active during the coming year. The work of this task force will parallel work done by the previous task force on Access to Periodicals and will scrutinize the kinds of access mechanisms that might be deployed to make access to monographic material more efficient and reliable. Besides these very direct responsibilities, the Commission will be engaged at the policy level in a great number of information-related areas as they arise. Some topics that are sure to gain the Commission's attention during the coming year are: evolving plans for the National Periodicals Center, plans for the five-year review of the Copyright Act of 1976, the rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934, and revision of Title 44 of the United States Code, which establishes Federal Government printing policy and the depository library system. Administration and Staffing Because of the additional tasks associated with planning the White House Conference, a special staff team specifically assigned to Conference affairs is temporarily working with the permanent staff of the Commission. The Conference staff will continue to expand during the coming year and then will be disbanded after the Conference occurs and the Report to the President is complete. The permanent staff will remain at approximately the same level of manpower throughout. Both staffs report to the Executive Director of NCLIS who reports to the Commission. As of September 30, 1978, the staff consisted of the following. List of Commission Staff Alphonse F. Trezza, Executive Director Douglas S. Price, Deputy Director Mary Alice Hedge Reszetar, Associate Director William D. Mathews, Staff Associate for Information Technology Carl C. Thompson, Administrative Assistant Dorothy S. Burgess, Secretary List of White House Conference Staff Ruth Liepmann Tighe, Program Coordinator Richard G. Akeroyd, Jr., Program Planning Consultant Budget The budget for the Commission for Fiscal Year 1978 was $598,000. Of this amount, approximately half was for salaries and benefits. An itemized fiscal statement may be found in Appendix VII. |