tive Director, will serve as Director, with Dr. Frederick Burkhardt, Chairman of NCLIS, serving as Chairman of the White House Conference Advisory Committee, as well as Chairman of the White House Conference itself. Shortly after the appropriation was signed into law and certified by the Treasury, the initial letters to the chiefs of the state and territorial library agencies were mailed, and in early August, the first group of initial payments on the grants to the states had been made. By the end of the fiscal year, almost every state and territory was committed to a state conference in preparation for the White House Conference in 1979, and the staff was developing guidelines and planning aids for the state conferences. One state, Georgia, which had been planning, a Governor's Conference turned it into a White House preconference and held it in September of 1977, and Pennsylvania, in a similar situation, had scheduled their conference for the end of October. At the second meeting, at the end of the fiscal year, the White House Conference Advisory Committee adopted a formula for state-by-state representation at the national White House Conference, but left the manner of selection of delegates to the individual states. More details were added to various policy statements, but more significantly, the Advisory Committee adopted as the official goal statement of the White House Conference on Library and Information Services the following: "It is the goal of the White House Conference on Library Supporting Studies National Inventory of Library Needs-1975 Progress in implementation of a national program must begin with a careful assessment of present status. What library resources are available, and how well-or poorly-do they fill the needs? NCLIS commissioned a study to make this determination in 1975 and the results were published early in 1977 (see Appendix VIII). The Commission was able to undertake this study only because it was not necessary to engage in the massive data collection and reduction effort that would normally be required to assemble the necessary resources data. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly conducts the Library General Information Surveys (LIBGIS) of public, academic and school libraries, and their data were made available to NCLIS for this study. The real difficulties arose over the selection of the indicators of need and the assignment of values to represent adequacy. A broadly representative advisory committee (see Appendix IX) to the NCLIS study spent most of its time identifying the indicators to be used and then determining how the values would be assigned for each indicator. The indicators and the value assignments are derived not only from existing U.S. standards, but also from "minimum requirements" and "guidelines" established by various states and all other sources which could be identified. The indicators selected were (1) Staffing (subdivided into professional and support); (2) Collection; (3) Acquisitions (both of these include print and nonprint media); (4) Space; (5) Operating Expenditures; and (6) Hours of Service. All but the last of these are resource inputs, as were the indicators in the 1965 inventory. The last indicator was selected in recognition of the need for output service indicators. It is recognized that Hours of Service is by no means a sufficient measure of service output, but for the purpose of this study, the committee was constrained by the necessity of limiting its indicators to categories for which the data were available in the LIBGIS files. It should be noted that the Commission feels very strongly that many important elements of library service were not measured in this study. Indeed, some of the most important elements, such as, user satisfaction and quality of service, are simply not subject to quantification. However, this does not eliminate the need for and value of quantitative measures when they can be obtained, as long as they are prudently used and their limitations are clearly recognized. The results of the study are disturbing. Although expenditures nationwide for library services doubled between 1965 and 1975even in constant dollars-the resources available are only slightly more than half the indicated needs, and the situation is worsening, rather than improving. Expenditures for additions to existing collections are falling further and further behind as a result of both inflation and the growth in the volume of available and useful materials. Staff and space needs are suffering similarly. Even more disturbing is the fact that the segment of the library community with the greatest shortages is the public school library/ media centers. Among the 75,000 schools having school library/ media centers, the resources available are barely one quarter of the indicated needs. Nor is there any indication that this gap is lessening. The rate of acquisition of new material is only 40% of what would be required to keep current if the collections were already full strength. Obviously, libraries are going to require stronger support and financing if they are to fulfill their responsibilities, but where must that support come from? The following study throws some light on that subject. Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Federal Funding of Public Libraries In response to suggestions that categorical aid programs for libraries and information services should be phased out and replaced by revenue sharing, NCLIS commissioned in late 1975 a study to evaluate the effectiveness of Federal funding programs for libraries, including revenue sharing. While the Commission has repeatedly and strongly supported categorical aid for libraries. and the preponderance of the information obtained at hearings around the country indicated that revenue sharing has not been effective for libraries, it felt that a systematic effort to compile factual information was necessary. Therefore, the study contractor was directed to examine all Federal aid programs which impacted libraries, including revenue sharing, assess their relative and absolute effectiveness, examine state and local library programs, and justify and recommend courses of action for meeting identified needs, for a time-phased program for state and Federal support, and for legislative requirements for the proposed pro gram. The results of this study are sobering, if not surprising. While categorical aid programs, such as the Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA), have been moderately effective in improving library service, revenue sharing has been ineffective, with less than two percent of the funds received by localities being allocated to libraries, and most of that simply replacing local funds, rather than supplementing them. It should be noted that LSCA and other categorical aid programs are characterized as only moderately effective. Part of this qualification arises from the fact that LSCA and its companions have never been funded at more than a fraction of the authorized level and some titles have never been funded at all. Further, there have been wide variations in the funding level from year to year. Obviously, improving the level and stability of funding of categorical aid would improve its effectiveness, but effectiveness would also be greatly improved by making minor modifications, such as forward funding to permit long range planning and placing a limit on the proportion of the funds which could be used for state administrative activities. The study confirmed still another widely held impression, that the overwhelming majority of funding for public libraries-82% nationwide is provided by the local communities, with states providing 13% and the Federal Government only about 5%. Most of the increased cost of the last decade has been borne by the local communities, with the state share increasing slightly, and the Federal share actually declining. These ratios clearly discriminate against the poorer communties, which needing library service more, will have access to less. When one considers that the public library has for more than a century been a significant element of the nation's educational system (as shown by a study performed for the Urban Libraries Council and published by NCLIS), it becomes apparent that a more balanced distribution of library support, approximating the distribution of support of other educational activities, is necessary if the public library is to fulfill effectively its role in providing "library and information services adequate to meet the needs of the people of the United States" in accordance with the statement of national policy in P.L. 91-345. The study proposes a staged program to increase state and federal library expenditures over a period of time until the states are carrying 50% of the load, localities 30%, and the Federal Government 20%. Library Photocopying in the United States During the years-long discussions and negotiations on the revision of the 1909 Copyright Law, a major bone of contention between publishers and libraries was the use by libraries of photocopies in lieu of loans, particularly interlibrary loans. The libraries contended that their photocopying did no harm to the publishers, and the publishers contended to the contrary. Curiously, there had never been a national study of photocopying in all types of libraries. When both the Congress and the Supreme Court indicated that it behooved the interested parties to come to an agreement on the matter outside of any legislative or judicial directive, the Chairman of NCLIS and the Register of Copyrights jointly convened and chaired a Conference on Resolution of Copyright Issues to provide a continuing forum for discussion among all concerned constituencies. In 1975, working groups of this conference found themselves unable to make further progress without mutually acceptable national data, so the Conference requested that NCLIS sponsor a study to collect this information, and analyze the implications of the results for a royalty payment mechanism. With financial assistance from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a contract for the study was awarded in the spring of 1976. Almost immediately, the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) joined in support by funding as a source of additional specific data a detailed analysis of a full year's transactions of the MINITEX system, the interlibrary loan network of the state of Minnesota. This study provides valuable information on the volume and characteristics of library photocopying in the United States, and reports that libraries made photocopies of some 114 million items in 1976, totaling almost one billion pages. Less than half of that material was copyrighted, and nearly three-quarters of the copyrighted items were articles from serials such as scholarly journals. The overwhelming majority of these copies were either for local users or for other branches within the same library system, with only about 11%, or 4.3 million copies being made for interlibrary loans. When the guidelines for permissible photocopying for interlibrary loan developed under the aegis of CONTU are applied to the interlibrary loan photocopies, the number of domestic serial article copies under six years old, not for replacement or classroom use and more than five articles from a given serial title (not issue) obtained by a given library, drops from 4.3 million to about one-half million. There is also high concentration of photocopying, within each class, about one-fifth of the libraries doing about three-quarters of the photocopying, and about two-thirds of the local use photocopies, and 86% of the interlibrary loan photocopies being made from only 20% of the serials. This study, completed just prior to the effective date of the new copyright law, 264-643 O - 78 - 3 |