Physical Access to Library Materials

W ITHIN the last few years librarians and scholars have become aware of a number of related facts about library collections and their growth and use that indicate that changes in library economy, in the old-fashioned sense of that term, are required if libraries are to meet their obligations. The first of these facts was the accelerating growth of library collections. This growth is the combined result of accumulation, for a new publication does not replace an old one but both must be kept; of more new publications each year as the result of a worldwide increase in population, in education, and in research; and of the expansion of research to include new fields and new regions of the earth requiring the acquisition of older materials not already owned. Together, these factors have resulted in every research library's adding more books, periodicals, and manuscripts each year than the year before, so the rate of growth is not arithmetic but geometric. In fact, every major university research library in the United States, regardless of absolute size, has been doubling that size about every sixteen years for as far back as records are available, and their operating budgets have doubled even oftener, since many unit costs increase as the library grows larger. It is obvious that growth at this rate cannot continue indefinitely. But the second fact discovered was even more disheartening. This was that library collections, despite accelerating growth, were falling ever further behind research and educational needs. For example, Harvard, with the largest university library in the world, now containing more than eight million volumes, concluded after a recent study that it was less adequate now to meet the needs of the university than it had been a few years ago when it had only four million volumes. To make matters still worse, an annually increasing number of older materials already in library collections are becoming unusable because the paper on which they are printed has become too brittle to handle without breaking. Thus, increasing amounts will have to be spent annually merely to assure the preservation of materials already existing in libraries. And, finally, as library materials increase, more money will have to be allocated to provide detailed bibliographic guides so that the user will not have to spend ever more time simply finding what he needs. These facts make it clear that no library, not even the largest, and certainly not every library, can ever hope to achieve the goal toward which library economy has in the past been chiefly directed: the goal of acquiring and housing on its own shelves all the library materials its readers may from time to time need. But the library's basic purpose of providing its readers with ready access to needed materials must be achieved or research will go so slowly that results will not be produced quickly enough to be fully beneficial to society. In the past every library has collected as comprehensively as possible in order to achieve maximum probability of providing any requested title and it had no practicable alternative, for if it did not have the title there was no assurance that another library would, or, if it did, that it would lend it. The result has been that every library has exerted maximum effort to avoid duplicating a title already in its collection in order to afford a title it did not already have. Interlibrary loan became practicable about 1900 (The American Library Association's first Interlibrary Loan Code was adopted in 1905), but was hedged about with many restrictions, as it still is. These restrictions, with a few exceptions such as the understandable reluctance to entrust a rare book to the risk of loss and the likelihood of damage, were based primarily on the assumption that the books a library acquired were needed by its own readers and that if one were sent away on interlibrary loan, to be gone for a month or six weeks, the owning library's readers would be inconvenienced and their research delayed. Delay in access was, and is, no less a hardship on the borrowing scholar, so that even