is to tie together information systems at all levels; Federal, multistate, individual state, and local, as well as compatible systems found in the private sector. The aim is to permit rapid delivery of needed services and materials to people in all jurisdictions without artificial institutional or geographic constraints.

Meeting the above eight priority objectives constitutes the sum of the Commission's proposed program. It attacks problems and deficiencies on a broad front and provides a comprehensive approach toward their solution. In some instances, existing programs would be strengthened or reoriented. In other cases, the Commission would initiate new programs— such as the nationwide network. To bring this all about will require new legislation. This legislation would need to: define the total program; assign responsibilities and functions within the Federal Government to relevant agencies; provide needed authorizations; specify the criteria for participation in the network; and authorize multiyear appropriations commensurate with program and accountability requirements.

The Nationwide Network Concept

Major Federal Responsibilities

A nationwide network of libraries and information centers means an integrated system encompassing state networks, multistate networks, and specialized networks in the public and private sectors. The Federal Government would force no library or information service to join the network, but it would provide technical inducements and funding incentives to state governments and the private sector to strengthen their ability to affiliate.

At first, network affiliation is expected to occur organizationally through formal agreements or contractual relationships among groups of libraries and other information facilities. But later, the Federal Government would provide financial and other incentives to the states and to the private sector to enable them to achieve working interconnection. In certain specific instances, the Federal Government would assume responsibility for the interstate portion of the network's activity. Specifically, it would collaborate with appropriate professional societies in promulgating interstate technical standards, and it would support the introduction of additional computer and

telecommunications facilities as needed for interstate purposes, and help establish protocols governing the way transactions are handled by the network. The commercial communication carriers are already building up their capacity to handle the type of traffic which is expected to flow over a nationwide network of libraries and information centers.

Within the National Program here advanced, the Commission sees the national network as a flexible, voluntary, and evolving confederation of those who deal with the nation's vast information resources. The following pages discuss major Federal responsibilities as identified by the National Com

mission.

(1) To encourage and promulgate standards. Without doubt, an essential function, to be performed by the agency responsible for implementing the nationwide network, will be that of encouraging and guiding the development and adoption of common standards and common practices, adherence to which is implicit in system design and implementation of a nationwide information network. These standards include those required to assure interconnection between intrastate networks, multistate networks, and specialized networks in the public and private sectors.

The importance of establishing standards at the national level cannot be overstated. It is the principal method for achieving economies of scale and reducing duplication among libraries and other members of the information community. Current research in computer networking clearly indicates the need for standards covering a variety of areas, including computer hardware and software, access protocols, data communications, data standards, data elements and codes, and bibliographic standards. Careful attention to standards problems and requirements at the design stage can significantly reduce the incompatibilities and interconnection problems that arise when independently developed systems are integrated into a coherent operating network. The establishment of standards late in the network development process would be disruptive, costly, and, frequently, ineffective.

The Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology (ICST) at the National Bureau of Standards has governmentwide responsibility for developing mandatory Fed

eral Information Processing Standards and for coordinating Federal participation in the development of voluntary computer standards, mainly through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The ANSI standardization program encompasses the development of standards and guidelines in a broad selection of areas, including computer software, data elements and codes, software documentation, computer security and controlled accessibility, computer networking, computer system performance measurement and evaluation, magnetic media, data communications and computer hardware. Although much of the Institute's technical program is conceptually relevant to the concerns of the National Program, it would appear that the outputs of the current program do not fully satisfy the requirements of the entire information community. Much more needs to be done, in both the public and private sectors, if the more generalized standardization problems are to be satisfactorily solved.

In addition to having technical standards, such as those relating to hardware and software, a nationwide network of library and information service will also need to strive for common bibliographic standards. The most powerful force for bibliographic standardization in the United States is the MARC-II format developed by the Library of Congress. The format has proved so useful that it has already been accepted as a standard by the American Library Association, the American National Standards Institute, and the International Standards Organization.

Aside from bibliographic standards for monographs and serials, other areas are in need of standards for their future uniform development. For example, bibliographic standards must be provided for reports, maps, pictures, films, machinereadable data files, sound recordings, etc. The Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) has already issued a publication entitled "Standards for Cataloging Non-Print Material," and the Library of Congress has work in progress to extend the MARC program to include the new media.

The commercial and not-for-profit indexing and abstracting services do not yet possess a common approach to bibliographic control. In order to achieve the goal of national interchange of bibliographic data over on-line computer/

communication systems, and to reduce the hazards of duplication of effort, it is imperative that this community take steps now towards the adoption of standards.

In the same vein, scholars working in the humanities are gradually building libraries of machine-readable texts. A large number of these literary texts exist in computer form already. If they are to be used efficiently by scholars in the future, plans must be laid now to develop them according to standard procedures and conventions. Agreement has been reached in the bibliographic world on a standard computer character set-such as the letters, the diacritical marks, numerals, punctuation, and special symbols-but more remains to be done to assure uniform adherence to these conventions by librarians and humanists.

At a Conference on National Bibliographic Control in April 1974, representatives of the public and private sector were unanimous in their agreement that a national system of bibliographic files is an essential part of a national bibliographic system. They recommended that these files be in a standard machine-readable format and that the data base contain ". . . certain records which will provide for the unique identification of each item and will list appropriate locations of each." 10 As As a result, a project under the auspices of NCLIS, the National Science Foundation, and the Council on Library Resources was started in February 1975 to achieve this bibliographic objective. The Commission firmly believes that unless common bibliographic standards are agreed upon along the lines of this recommendation, the nation will face a form of information chaos within the next few years.

And, finally, standards are needed in the areas of reprography and micrographics. Although a number of useful standards already exist, there are a great number of examples of nonstandardization which users currently endure. For example, there is no universal microfilm cartridge on the market that is compatible with all available equipment. Considering that more than two hundred companies are engaged in manufacturing microfilm equipment and services, the development of standards is, at best, a difficult chore. However, if microfilm is to become a dynamic medium in library operations, then users, producers and groups like the National Microfilm Association

and the American Library Association, must work together to standardize its adaptability to information functions.

It appears that reasoned and effective standardization is the best way, if not the only way, to obtain maximum national benefit from electronic networking and new information formats. If there is to be the level of hardware, software, and bibliographic standards required for nationwide networking, full and active community participation in developing these standards is mandatory. A very high percentage of the total input to libraries is now, and will continue to be, provided by the private sector. Technical and bibliographic standards will control both the form and the content of this input. All computer-readable data, as well as all microforms, will be impacted by these standards. A higher degree of expertise than is currently available in any one sector will be required to set these standards. The Federal Government, therefore, has a responsibility to encourage and support present and future standardization efforts, both in the public and private sectors, and to provide for the modification of existing standards and the coordinated development of new standards as they are needed. The responsible Federal agency would view the promulgation and enforcement of standards as one of its major and most important functions.

(2) To make unique and major resource collections available nationwide. The new network would make unique and major resource collections available nationwide. The term "unique collections" refers to a body of materials and information which shares a common characteristic, such as form (newspapers), period (Renaissance), language (Japanese), or subject (chemistry). The Commission recognizes that there are many institutions in the country, both publicly and privately supported, whose collections include one-of-a-kind resources of general interest and potential benefit for the entire population, e.g., the comprehensive research collections of Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and the Newberry Library, or less-well known but singularly important, the Glass Information Center in Corning, New York, the Chemical Abstracts Service in Columbus, Ohio, and many others. The responsible Federal agency must identify means for protect