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needed to protect the economic viability and continuing creativity of authorship and publishing.

CURRENT PROBLEMS IN LIBRARIES

The libraries in the United States, together with other information agencies, are the foundation on which a nationwide network should be built. The current problems of Federal, public, special, school and school media, university and research and other academic libraries are detailed in the full text of the proposed national program. The following principal concerns are generalized from testimony taken at the Commission's regional hearings, from research studies and reports and from conferences with professional and lay groups.

1. The growth of libraries in the United States has been fragmented and uneven, leading to waste and duplication of the total knowledge resource and, for lack of common standards, creating obstacles to a cohesive national program.

2. The distribution of library services is correlated with that of population and financial support. While some people have easy access to rich resources, others still lack the most elementary forms of service.

3. The problems of people who lack even the most basic information services or are served only marginally must be identified and addressed.

4. There is a limit to self-sufficiency in the ability of any library, even the largest public or research library, to satisfy its constituents.

5. Special libraries with work-related goals serve at present only limited clienteles.

6. Funding at every level is inadequate. A major change in Federal policy is needed to ensure mutually reinforcing funding formulas.

7. New Federal legislation should give local libraries the incentive to join larger systems outside their immediate jurisdictions.

THE TREND TOWARD
COOPERATIVE ACTION

PRESENT NETWORK ACTIVITIES.

Librarians have long shared resources through such means as union catalogs and interlibrary loans. During recent years, encouraged by Federal and state leadership and funding, they have begun to evolve more formal, contractural "systems," "consortia," or "networks," a few of which, such as MEDLARS, already benefit from com

puter and telecommunications technology in the provision of regional and local services from national resources. Typical of evolving networks are the intrastate programs in California, Illinois, New York, Ohio and Washington, and the interstate programs in New England, the Southeast and the Southwest. Increasingly, the search for fruitful ways to share the public/private knowledge resource crosses geographical, jurisdictional and type-of-library boundaries.

BARRIERS TO COOPERATIVE ACTION.

1. The information community in the public and private sectors is growing more diverse and the components-the libraries, the publishing industry, the information industry, the indexing and abstracting services, the educational institutions and the various government agencies-have had little experience in working together toward a common national goal.

2. State and local, institutional and private funding is unstable and insufficient and is not designed to foster interjurisdictional cooperation.

3. Traditional funding patterns are not supportive of both local and nationwide objectives.

4. No national guidelines ensure the development of compatible statewide and multistate network services.

5. Many Federal libraries and information centers have neither adopted a fully-open policy toward serving the general public nor formed among themselves a Federal network.

6. The attitude of librarians toward the new technolo-
gies and new conceptions of the role of the library
in society is often negative.

7. The library workforce needed to plan, develop and
operate cooperative networks is not yet being well
enough trained to deal with nonprint materials or
with computer and communication technologies.
8. Except for the Library of Congress, the nation does
not yet have an official center to coordinate the
processing and distribution of standard biblio-
graphic records.

9. A final obstacle to the sharing of resources is the
lack of public knowledge about their existence and
location.

THE RECOMMENDED NATIONAL PROGRAM

The recommended national program is an overall structure within which current deficiencies can be corrected and future requirements addressed. It is intended to be evolutionary, and it assumes the continuation of and need for catergorical aid. It would coordinate and reinforce all Federal efforts to support local and specialized services.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES.

1. Ensure that basic library and information services
are adequate to meet the needs of all local com-
munities. Local libraries and information centers
of all kinds and sizes are vital links with the peo-
ple. For the sharing of resources, strong systems
need strong components.

2. Provide special services to special constituencies,
including the unserved. Large sectors of our socie-
ty need attention and materials of unusual sorts-
the poor, the illiterate, the visually and physically
handicapped, the institutionalized, the ethnic mi-
norities, the retarded, the very young, the very old,
the innercity youths, the migrant workers, etc.
3. Strengthen existing statewide resources and sys-
tems. The states are the building blocks of any na-
tional system; yet, while some states have well-
developed programs, others do not and some have
no statewide programs at all. The national pro-
gram would help the states to form intrastate net-
works compatible with the one built for national
use. The Federal Government would fund those as-
pects of the national program that are of national
concern in return for a commitment from the
states to accept, in cooperation with the local gov-
ernments, a fair share of the responsibility for
funding libraries within their own jurisdictions.
4. Develop and continually educate the people re-
quired to implement a national program. A suc-
cessful program will depend on new approaches to
manpower development, technical training, contin-
uing education and trustee orientation.

5. Coordinate existing Federal programs of library
and information service. The thousands of Federal
libraries and other information services, including
the national libraries, are critical parts of the na-
tional program and must be maintained, as admin-
istratively autonomous units, at levels high enough
to fully satisfy the national need.

6. Make the private sector an active partner in the development of the national program.

7. Establish a locus of Federal responsibility charged with implementing the national program under the policy guidance of the National Commission. This agency should have authority to make grants and contracts and to promote standards, but must be supportive and coordinate rather than authoritarian and regulatory.

8. Plan, develop and implement a nationwide network of library and information service. Only by melding of present and future cooperative systems into a national structure can the rich resources of this nation be fully exploited.

Meeting the above eight priority objectives constitutes the sum of the Commission's proposed program. In some instances, existing programs would be strengthened or reoriented. In other cases, the Commission would initiate new programs-such as the nationwide network.

THE NATIONWIDE NETWORK CONCEPT
MAJOR FEDERAL RESPONSIBILITIES.

The Federal Government would force no library or other information service to join the network, but would provide technical inducements and funding incentives to state governments and the private sector to strengthen their ability to become effective components of a mutually reinforcing program.

1. TO ESTABLISH STANDARDS.

The Federal Government has a major responsibility to encourage and support efforts to develop: (a) the standards required to assure interconnecting between intrastate networks, multistate networks and specialized networks in the public and private sectors; (b) the standards for computer software, access and security protocols, data elements and codes; (c) for bibliographic format (as in MARC II); (d) for journal articles; (e) for maps, pictures, films, computer tapes and sound recordings; (f) for literary texts in machinereadable form; and (g) for reprography and micrographics.

2. TO MAKE UNIQUE NATIONAL

COLLECTIONS AVAILABLE NATIONWIDE. Institutions with unique resources of national significance such as the Harvard University Libraries, the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library and

the Glass Information Center in Corning, New York, would be provided incremental funding to help extend their extramural services to the whole country.

3. TO DEVELOP CENTRALIZED SERVICES FOR NETWORKING.

While many services can be better managed locally, others might be sponsored centrally in either the public or private sector. For example, a national audiovisual repository, a national system of interlibrary communication, a national periodical bank, or machine-readable data banks of articles and abstracts in the fields of language, literature, musicology, etc.

4. TO EXPLORE COMPUTER USE.

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In due course, computers will become indispensable tools of network operations, not only for routine clerical tasks but also for the retrieval of the knowledge resource in machine-readable form. In addition dedicated mini-computers for local internal processing, a nationwide network might be expected to employ centralized computer installations (a) for production of bibliographic data for use by local agencies throughout the country; and (b) for searching the knowledge resource itself to learn what is available where, to record new holdings and to arrange interlibrary delivery.

5. TO APPLY NEW FORMS OF

TELECOMMUNICATIONS.

In order to place people in more immediate contact with the total national information resource, a future telecommunications system might eventually integrate teletype, audio, digital and video signals into a single system. The greatest boon to national access to the public knowledge resource would be free or reduced rates for educational and cultural use of the Federal Telecomminications System and satellite communication channels, at least until the traffic reached an economically viable level.

6. TO SUPPORT RESEARCH

AND DEVELOPMENT.

A Federal program of research and development, through grants and contracts, should address such problems as the application of new technologies, the relevance of services to different reader communities, the effects of new information systems on users, and the profession itself as it struggles with the dynamics of change

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