The Financing of the Research Library

IN THE coMPLETION OF ITS MISSION the National Commission on the Financing of Postsecondary Education will be reviewing a broad spectrum of fiscal requirements. The supporting role of libraries may easily cause this sector of the total picture to be given minimal notice or even to be overlooked; yet the significance of the library's contribution to the educational and research processes and their substantial budgetary impact are so great as to warrant careful scrutiny by the commission. In 1967 the American Council of Learned Societies published the following statement: "'Research libraries may be defined as institutions whose collections are organized primarily to meet the needs of scholars and so to facilitate effective action on the frontier of every field of knowledge, traditional and novel. . . . At their best they are notable for the variety and depth of their holdings and for the quality of research that they support.''1 These relatively well-stocked libraries make an indispensable contribution to higher education and research in every section of the country and indeed in all parts of the world. The research library is typically a university library similar to the eighty-plus which are members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Much of what we say applies also to certain major nonuniversity li-