In accordance with the Executive Order of the President of the United States, we are pleased to transmit to the President's Committee on Libraries the recommendations of the National Advisory Commission on Libraries. The Commission believes that its six broad objectives for the transitional and future development of library and information services can be achieved responsibly and realistically through the structural and organizational recommendations set forth in these pages. The Commission has tried diligently to meet its charge as set forth in Chapter 1 of this Report. We have met eleven times as a full Commission to discuss library problems and potentials as perceived by a most interesting diversity of viewpoints represented by our membership. We have heard formal testimony and had informal discussions with technological experts, librarians, people from government and private agencies, and a variety of users and producers of both conventional literary material and newer forms of informational transfer. Regional hearings were held in communities throughout the country by members of the Commission to ascertain the people's library needs at the grass roots of our nation. Special studies on a number of relevant topics, in most cases specially commissioned by us, were submitted to the Commission and contributed to our deliberations on problems and issues. Already, areas for vital new research are evident. On the basis of deliberations through early December 1967, the Commission had agreed on its recommendations and reached some basic conclusions on fulfilling the national policy we recommend for library services appropriate to the needs of the people. We presented these conclusions and our specific recommendations in a preliminary Report dated December 1967. Since then, the Commission has prepared a chapter analyzing its response to the President's charge, completed a statement on library manpower for Chapter 3, and made certain other refinements and modifications in the five basic recommendations now set forth in Chapter 4. - The work we have started can continue most meaningfully through the combined efforts of many existing and evolving entities, coordinated by the overall planning efforts of our recommended National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. There must be continuing, coordinated study and action in the years ahead it is an ongoing, never-ending venture. Because the results of all the activities of the present Commission can continue to provide resource on library and information science and service in the future, we are supplementing our Report with a forthcoming volume which will be based on a variety of materials and data, including the special studies, in an attempt to synthesize and document a complex set of problems and issues. At this time, it is our hope that the President's Committee on Libraries.will study our Report and commend our proposals for action to the early attention of the President and the Congress. The problems are urgent. A sound beginning can be made. Melville J. Ruggles, Executive Director (November 1, 1966-December 31, 1967) Daniel J. Reed, Deputy Director (January 1, 1967-December 31, 1967) E. Shepley Nourse, Editor (August 15, 1967 Mary Alice Hedge, Administrative Officer Richard K. Burns, Research Associate (September 11, 1967-December 31, 1967) FOREWORD When the President appointed the National Advisory Commission on Libraries more than a year ago, he gave it a demanding task, and one with urgent as well as enduring aspects. He asked the Commission to consider the nation's library structure, the nature of the present and wisest possible future involvement of Federal support in the development of national library and informational resources, and the most effective shaping of those resources to our common need as we can picture it over the next decade. This third concern of the Commission has been for resources of every kind, and needs at every level. We know very well how difficult it is to relate Federal and local, public and private sources of support and definitions of purpose, but we have tried to suggest some of the ways in which that crucial job can be done. Our recommendations will be understood best, I think, by seeing them as they result from our basic concern for adequate library resources. This concern may in its turn seem simple or self-evident until we look at the history of libraries and the needs of this country in the late 20th century--needs which grow equally from the individual citizen and the large corporation, the pioneering university and the complex Federal agency. The historical growth of libraries is a vivid commentary on our problems today, in fact, for we see at major periods in the past the development of one or two particular kinds of library. Today we have the whole array of libraries alive at once; our world demands this variety, while our achievements and our great need grow from it. We are Alexandrian or Renaissance citizens in our development of great book and manuscript collections which range across the past of Western culture; we are Roman or Baroque in many of our superb private and personally shaped libraries; we are medievalists in our development of libraries for specialized fields of learning; and we continue the public or national traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries in our great Federal, municipal, and university libraries. Just as we have an astonishing range of demands on our libraries, so we have range in the kinds of library we create and support. But what in fact do we mean by a library? We must ask this elementary question, because we are surrounded, almost overwhelmed, by the tangible fact of libraries. We take their meaning, like their existence, too much for granted. That existence and meaning are best understood, perhaps, by realizing what libraries are not not ware 28-638 - 69-2 |