SUPPORTING STUDIES 1. Information Needs of Users In an early public statement the members of the Commission announced that their philosophy of operation was to be useroriented. This required a deeper understanding of the information user than was thought to be available. An initial study document* written for the Commission by Ruth Patrick and Michael Cooper verified the paucity of dependable information in this area. To fulfill its requirement, the Commission began its own program of studies on the information needs of users. Under a Commission contract Mr. Charles Bourne, Director of the Institute of Library Research at the University of California (Berkeley), agreed to provide some guidance to the types of users whose distinct information needs would require consideration in terms of library services and information systems. ** The objectives of the work were: (1) to identify the principal population groups whose information needs differ in significant ways from those of the general population and to define those differences; and (2) to formulate an array of possible specifications for the post-1975 library services that will meet the needs that have been defined. Work commenced with a broad survey, search and study of the relevant published reports on various user types. Consideration of the methodologies applicable to the development of future library and information services followed. * Ruth J. Patrick; Michael D. Cooper; Information Needs of the Nation: A Preliminary Analysis, School of Librarianship, University of California, Berkeley, California, May 1972. ** Charles P. Bourne; Victor Rosenberg; Marcia J. Bates; Gilda R. Perolman; Preliminary investigation of Present and Potential Library and Information Service Needs, Institute of Library Research, University of California, Berkeley, California, February 1973. Current studies confirm decades-old profiles that in the general population the typical public library user is young, female, single, well-educated, white and middle-class. Libraries have a positive image in the community and serve many users, but their potential is larger than their current utilization even for the population considered most served and best served. In the extension of services to all types of minority populations, libraries serve lower percentages of the persons to be served and, generally, serve less effectively. The report of the Institute of Library Research identified several minority groups whose special needs require attention. Among them are: American Indians Blacks Blind and Partially Sighted Children and Young Adults Deaf Economically and Socially Disadvantaged Foreign Language Speaking (and Reading) People Mentally Retarded Mexican-Americans Migrant Workers Nonprofessionals Older People Physically Handicapped and Shut-Ins Prisoners Professionals with Job-Related Information Needs Students Women These subgroups were studied in terms of single variables: age, economic level or housing location. Each group was found to have information needs different from the needs of the general population. No effort was made to identify subgroups in terms of multivariable descriptions such as the term "disadvantaged" might imply. Discussions and interviews with concerned persons resulted in the formulation of the following observations: 1. It would be worthwhile to continue the effort to upgrade many of the current national standards-expanding their scope and incorporating the latest thinking regarding the general functions and objectives of public information services. 2. It is not possible now to develop a complete set of meaningful objectives, standards or specification statements. Further study is required. 3. It is difficult to formulate specification statements that are both general enough to cover most situations and specific enough to be a basis for design or evaluation efforts. It does seem to be worth the effort to continue the attempt to develop such specifications at both the local and national levels. 4. The National Commission on Libraries and Information Science is the appropriate organization to lead this national system planning effort. 2. Information and Society The information needs of the people of the United States will continue to be influenced by social and economic trends as well as by changes in the technology that can be economically applied to information service. These changes, particularly in the next five to ten years, would be of importance to the work of the Commission. A basis for prediction was sought from Dr. Edwin B. Parker of the Stanford University Institute for Communications Research. Dr. Parker's report-available in its entirety from ERIC 1/-is to be republished in part with the Commission report on a User's Needs Conference described below. Dr. Parker was asked to examine the trends in economics, social behavior and technology and to extrapolate from those trends the types of information service that will be needed in the next decade. The time frame was selected to be close enough to the present for some projections and predictions to be based on more than guesswork, yet distant enough to allow time for planning and implementation. 1/ Document ED 073776; see Appendix VII for the full citation. Dr. Parker deals with information as a survival commodity whose importance rivals that of matter and energy. He notes that the effective conversion of matter into energy (or vice versa) to meet human needs depends upon the availability of information on how to accomplish the task. Investment, therefore, in the improved production and distribution of information (a nondepleting commodity) may be the only way to make the best use of the depleting commodities whose consumption is equated with the quality of life in many areas of human experience. But the level of the investment in the distribution of knowledge, Dr. Parker insists, must bear a favorable current and future relationship to the return on that investment. This is true for education, for information services and for communication services. It is to this point that Dr. Parker addresses his paper as he predicts changes in economics, social behavior and technology. Dr. Parker predicts growing gross national product whose components are undergoing rapid change-one that increases the significance of information and education relative to other types of productivity. He ratifies his expectation that the dominant trend in society is away from hard goods production and toward information and education "production" and distribution with statistics on dollar volume and on the labor force employed in various areas over a time span of the last quarter century. He reaches five conclusions regarding the kinds of information service that will be required: 1. Expanded audio and video services should be provided in response to the general shift toward greater use of such media that will occur during the rest of this decade. 2. Greater emphasis on information for the "information-poor" will be necessary to counterbalance partially the likely widening of the gap between the "information-rich" and the "informationpoor" that will result from increased commercial development and exploitation of information technology (including pay television). 3. Switching centers and referral services should be developed so that libraries can come closer to meeting the widening diversity of information needs, even though it may be uneconomical to provide a full range of service in each local library. 4. Consideration should be given to improving access for each citizen to public information about government services and government decision making at all levels. Minutes and supporting documents of all local government boards and committees could be made accessible through local libraries, for example. Within a few years a national network of Federal Government information could be made available to local libraries via computer time sharing and information retrieval techniques, just as medical references are made available to the medical libraries by the National Library of Medicine's Medline System. Computerized congressional information systems now being developed could be made nationally accessible by the Library of Congress. 5. National service to local libraries (e.g., on-line computerized searches of the Library of Congress MARC files) could be provided (analogous to Medline) to make national bibliographic information readily accessible throughout the country. These needs of the future have been incorporated in the national program document now being shaped by the Commission. 3. The Denver Conference on User's Needs As noted above, the Patrick-Cooper report concluded that very little useful data on the information needs of various types of people have been collected or analyzed. Dr. Bourne enumerated the groups whose information needs would require individual analyses and response. Dr. Parker forecast the economic, social and technical changes of the next decade that would force upon society a requirement to reassess and restructure the ways in which information is provided to citizens. Although these observations were helpful, they were far from the definitive conclusions that the Commission requires. The reports, taken together, constitute a "homework" phase of the investigation and lead directly toward the Commission's next steps in the study of the information needs of users. The remaining requirement was for practical knowledge of the information needs of groups whose specific requirements for information have been neither understood nor fulfilled by current library and information services. Nearly everyone has information needs and some of these needs can be met if they are understood, yet there has been no articulation of the needs and no development of the priorities that will determine whose needs are met first from the limited resources that are available. To address these substantive concerns, a small invitational working conference was held in Denver, Colorado, in May 1973. There, the Commission's Committee on User's Needs advised by a small group of persons whose research on user's needs was in the forefront of current scholarship, met with a score of representatives of specific groups of users. Each representative was asked to provide an advanced paper on the information needs of his or her group. The papers were circulated to the participants in advance of the conference in order that there could be an effective exchange of information once the meeting began. The types of user groups represented were: The papers were identically structured. The authors were asked to define the characteristics of their group, to indicate why their group should receive information services, to define the needs of their group for library and information service, to assess the adequacies and deficiencies of current library and information services and to indicate some strategy for fulfilling the needs. During the first day of the conference the participants held a full and free exchange of the views represented in their individual papers. This exchange was followed on the final day by a rigorously structured, three-prong attack on the most serious of the user need problems facing the Commission. The initial problem was that of expressing and defining user needs in terms acceptable to all. The participants had heard 17 different ways of expressing needs. There was difficulty in differentiating a |