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Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you, Ms. Hamilton.

Ms. Markuson, I am glad to see someone from my home State here, too, needless to say.

STATEMENT OF BARBARA EVANS MARKUSON, PROJECT DIRECTOR, COOPERATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHIC CENTER FOR INDIANA LIBRARIES, INDIANAPOLIS, IND.

MS. MARKUSON. I am glad to be here.

I am Barbara Evans Markuson, executive director of the Indiana Cooperative Library Services Authority-INCOLSA-a statewide cooperative serving more than 100 public, school, academic, and special libraries. I have spent the last 10 years working principally on projects related to interlibrary cooperation and the use of computers to support interlibrary cooperation. I want to testify in support of title III, interlibrary cooperation.

And I will summarize my testimony briefly.

One, I think the notion that we don't need to do anything more about helping libraries needs to be looked at, particularly, Mr. Chairman, in connection with your own State of Indiana, in which 25 percent of the State, geographically, with 500,000 citizens, has no public library

service.

In Indiana, half of our public libraries spend less than $4,400 annually for books and other materials, and half of our school libraries have less than $2,000 annually to spend for books and audiovisual materials. Thus, in Indiana, as in other States, we are far from giving uniformly excellent service to our citizens.

Title III in Indiana has supported an interlibrary teletype network which has allowed small public libraries access to the resources of the large public libraries, the State library, and even up to the Library of Congress.

One librarian in a small, satellite library recently told me that the teletype network was her lifeline. Yet, in Indiana, the title III funds to support this lifeline have amounted annually to $24,815, or about $230 per library.

Title III has also been used to make vital socioeconomic data available through public libraries through a project called INDIRE, In

diana information retrieval system, which allows the public library to give socioeconomic data from an online data base to support people such as day-care workers, county planning commissions, students, and hospitals.

We have established cooperative networks in Indiana at the multicounty level and a State level. Increased funding of title III will be essential to the development of these cooperatives. We need time. We need time to eliminate the barriers which still remain.

When we are talking about interlibrary cooperation, we are talking about flow of information across jurisdictional lines. We are talking about helping public service librarians realize and meet these specialized needs of our citizens, such as the physically handicapped, the aged, non-English-speaking users, and others who require specialized

assistance.

We need time to get more input from our users as to how they would like a cooperative library network to develop.

In particular, we need time to work with the many hundreds of laypeople who are involved in library service, college and university boards, school library boards, and public library boards.

Interlibrary cooperation involves working with nonlibrarians as well as librarians.

I submit to you that at this critical time with new technologies on the horizon, we are just now entering into library service, that you can give us the time that we need by not eliminating title III funding, not reducing it, but increasing support for interlibrary cooperation.

Thank you.

[The statement of Barbara Evans Markuson follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF BARBARA E. MARKUSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE INDIANA COOPERATIVE LIBRARY SERVICES AUTHORITY

I am Barbara Evans Markuson, Executive Director of the Indiana Cooperative Library Services Authority (INCOLSA) a state-wide cooperative serving more than one hundred public, school, academic, and special libraries. I have spent the last ten years working principally on projects related to interlibrary cooperation and the use of computers to support interlibrary cooperation. I want to testify in support of Title III, Interlibrary Cooperation.

The public library is the only personal source of information freely accessible to our citizens for their entire life span. Public libraries thus make a great, and frequently overlooked, contribution to American society. However, many of our citizens are severely penalized when their local public library, through inadequate support, cannot meet their information needs. Through interlibrary cooperation we seek to mobilize all libraries, public school, academic, and others in a system which will serve as a back-up of staff expertise, information resources, and technology, to assist the local library in serving its users better.

As you consider Title III, please keep in mind the meagre information resources that are available to many of our citizens. In your state, Mister Chairman, as this map shows, one-fourth of the state, an area with 500,000 citizens, has no public libraries. In Indiana, half of our public libraries spend less than $4,000 for books and other materials, and half of our school libraries have less than $2,000 annually to spend for books and audio-visual materials. Thus, in Indiana as in other states, we are far from giving uniformly excellent service to our citizens. I believe that interlibrary cooperation, as well as improved local libraries, will be a major factor in improving the present situation.

Let me give some specific examples of the impact of Title III in Indiana. Title III funds have supported a Teletype network which links our small libraries to the nearest large public library which is, in turn, linked to the Indiana State Library. The State Library is linked to our major academic libraries and to the Library of Congress. For example, the South Bend Public Library serves such

small satellite libraries as Argos, Milford, Nappanee, and Warsaw. A librarian in a small satellite library recently told me that this Teletype Network was her "lifeline." In 1975 this "lifeline" served 109 libraries and provided assistance in answering reference requests and locating needed materials 43,975 times. The cost was $24,815 or about $230 per library. Title III is one of the best investments you can make.

Title III funds were used in a cooperative effort involving Indiana University, the Indiana State Library, and school and public libraries whereby a socio-economic data base developed at Indiana University was made available to our citizens through their local libraries. We believe INDIRS (the Indiana Information Retrieval System) is a unique project. INDIRS users have included regional planning commissions, departments of public welfare, community action groups, educators, students, hospitals, and child case workers, who obtain INDIRS information through their local libraries. Let me read one user's comment: "The data about the counties I serve, all on one sheet, easily readable . . . is more than I could hope for . . . the data will be useful as I plan developmental work in day care. . ." The current cost of making this resource available is about $6,000 a year from Title III or about eighty-three cents a user request.

Another Title III project resulted in a computerbased Indiana Union List of Serials which records more than 150,000 holdings in 60 libraries. Title III funds supported the computer processing and distribution costs, but the compilation of the data was a massive cooperative undertaking for the libraries involved.

In Indiana we have formally established legally based cooperative at the multi-county level, and the state-wide cooperative which I head which is also an established legal entity. Through these groups all types of libraries working together with the Indiana State Library, are seeking to improve library service through cooperation. A major state-wide effort this year is the installation of a computer-based catalog network through cooperation with the Ohio College Library Center. This effort would not be possible for Indiana libraries, if they had to develop such a system locally.

Throughout the country state-wide cooperative networks are under development. Networks are established in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and Washington. I was recently in Mississippi where a state network is being planned. Interstate cooperative library groups are established in New England. in the Southeast, the Midwest, the West, and the Southwest. Thousands of libraries are working toward a network that will bring massive resources and talent to assist each individual library meet users' needs when local sources are insufficient.

We need time. Time to eliminate barriers which still remain. There are legal barriers that impede the free flow of services across jurisdictional lines. Time to do continuing education in interlibrary cooperation. Time to help public service librarians recognize and plan for services for special users such as the physically handicapped, the aged, the non-English speaking user, and others requiring specialized assistance, Time to get ideas from our users. Time to prove the worth of our efforts to hundreds of local school boards, public library boards, and college and university boards. Interlibrary cooperation involves working with thousands of non-librarians in developing participatory arrangements. You can provide the time we need, at this critical point in our efforts, by continuing support to interlibrary cooperation.

I strongly urge you not to eliminate Title III funding, not to reduce Title III funding, but to increase support for interlibrary cooperation.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, indeed.

My thanks and that of the subcommittee to all of you for your very useful, illuminating testimony.

Let me make a comment or two and then put some questions to you. I might say that I share the concern, Ms. Martin, that you have expressed, as well as some of the other witnesses, as to the failure of President Ford to announce his appointments to the White House Advisory Council. I have had similar experience with the President in respect of other matters.

I happen, also, to be the sponsor of the legislation that mandated the establishment of a commission to inquire into the handling and disposition of papers of all Federal officials, and we finally got some nominees to that, but the President was so dilatory that now, next month, I am going to have to hold hearings in another committee on a bill to extend the life of that commission.

I am distressed also that President Ford has not yet made a budget request for the White House Conference on Library and Information Services, and I say this is no partisan vein, because I am glad to say that Democrats and Republicans on this subcommittee and this committee and in the House and Senate have strongly supported libraries, but President Nixon, and President Ford following in the same tradition, have, I think, put themselves on record as being profoundly hostile to libraries in this country. And I think it ought to go right on the public record, it is not a question about which one wants to be ambiguous.

They seem to have a vested interest in illiteracy that the Republican Members of Congress do not, and so I would anticipate that there will be strong support for extension of the library services bill from both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

That quarrel is not between the parties but between this end of the Avenue and the other end of the Avenue.

Now, we will be hearing from the Administration witnesses shortly, and they will have plenty of opportunity to think about what I have said and give me all the facts and figures to show how profoundly mistaken I am.

I am also much taken by your comments with respect to, Ms. Martin, the Administration's proposal for library partnership. And it seems to me anomalous that an Administration that talks so much about the importance of decisionmaking at a local level should have abandoned that principle when it comes to this particular field of activity.

It is not surprising to me that there is so little support for that particular proposal.

I share as well your apprehensions about the Administration's theory that general revenue sharing can be an adequate substitute for the Library Services and Construction Act. This is, of course, the standard line that we get from the Administration in respect of every kind of program, as if there were enough general revenue-sharing moneys to go around.

I think you made the point very well in your testimony when you observed that the pattern of assistance from revenue-sharing funds, so far as libraries are concerned, is extraordinarily uneven across the country and, moreover, the manner of accounting for these funds is of so complex a nature that it is difficult to know just who is getting what.

We have had a very hard time understanding just what the facts. are and you will get extraordinary letters from the revenue-sharing office here at least, I have-when Mr. Pepper and I commissioned GAO studies on revenue-sharing moneys expended through municipal governments for children, for the very old, and for the handicapped. which led us to think we are doing a splendid job with revenue sharing, at least in respect of programs for the elderly.

I would ask you, Ms. Markuson, to turn a word of criticism to my own State government now, why is it, in your view, that Indiana has been so recalcitrant in voting State grants in aid for local public libraries support?

We are supposed to hear a lot of States' rights out in my neck of the woods.

MS. MARKUSON. I am a newcomer to that State, and I find this is a very interesting aspect. As you know, we are only one of nine States left without any State support. We are hoping to continue to work on that.

I think it is still a feeling that the local taxpayers can have a library if they want a library and not have a library if they don't want a library, and we simply have to continue to hammer away at the notion that we are going to have library service.

I don't know the reason behind it, since I am new in the State. Mr. BRADEMAS. As some of you have heard me say before, the first measure in which I was ever involved as a member of this committee 17 years ago was an effort to include Indiana in the rural library program. It was, I think, the last State in the Union not to participate in the program. Our then Governor Hanley, who thought this was a wicked and evil operation, was hostile because tainted Federal money would be coming into our State. At least we made progress in this

respect.

I take it that most of you feel that we should continue authorization for the library construction program. Is there disagreement with that proposition on the part of any of the witnesses?

[No response.]

Mr. BRADEMAS. Well, the Chair hears none, let the record show. I am also struck by what seems to be a common position on your part of support for the interlibrary cooperation program, title III, and of common opposition to the administration's efforts to kill this program.

Is there any disagreement with my summary of your attitudes?

Ms. MARTIN. If I might reinforce what we have said already; this has been one of the most successful programs we have been engaged in, I think, across the country.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I have two other questions.

Could you give us any comments on the general attitude of the library community toward title IV, the older readers' services program. Ms. MARTIN. I should just say that it has been a matter of regret that it hasn't been funded. There is a real need. We see shifting in public libraries. The population we are serving is changing so much, and whereas we formerly had a predominance of younger patrons, which we still have, we now see this predominance of older patrons, and there is a critical need for funding now.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Any other comments by any witness on that?

Mr. HUMPHRY. I think. Mr. Chairman, that we should have the record show that the public libraries consider the fact that we do serve the entire spectrum of the population, and in New York State we have emphasized services to the elderly regardless of whether or not additional funds have been forthcoming, because these people stand to benefit from the services that a library provides, not just in recreational

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