Library Wait

SOMEWHERE in Washington a report that may yet be monumental for the future of American libraries is peacefully hibernating. It was finished in late November by a committee of the American Council of Learned Societies (including University Librarian, Douglas W. Bryant) and dispatched to President Johnson's Commission on Libraries which was expected to recommend huge new federal programs a few weeks after. Three months later the Commission still is sitting on the final version of its report. The silence could be broken any day, but it seems increasingly likely that the Commission is simply waiting this legislative season out.

Behind the delay lies the widening shadow cast by the Vietnam war. Because of the war's expense, Bryant says, the President probably "doesn't want to introduce new programs that have to be financed in novo." It is not clear just what the Commission's report will recommend, but it is sure to call for big increases in federal expenditures on libraries. And Johnson gave this kind of expenditure a distant second priority in his Education message to Congress, so the immediate prospects for pushing federal construction of massive new research centers look thoroughly bleak.

The Commission on Libraries is a particularly complex variation on Johnson's familiar bureaucracy for studying domestic problems. A separate committee (which includes the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the head of the Library of Congress and the director of the National Science Foundation) will advise the President on the Commission's findings. And the Commission, is having a huge chunk of its work done by outside experts--the ACLS group. The ACLS, Bryant says, intends that its report "have a life of its own," regardless of how it is treated by Johnson's Commission and Committee.

Bryant and his colleagues are left in a delicate position by the sluggish official progress of their recommendations. They are anxious to spread their view of the needs of American research libraries, but relucant to undercut the punch of the report by speculating what the Commission should say. The report may call for federally supported regional research centers, and Harvard would of course be a logical location for a New England center. But the legislation for such a project can't be considered until the Commission's report is released.

This is the worst of times, though, to try to get the public to pay attention to the nation's library needs, and there seems little alternative but to wait. For the present the "life of its own" Bryant sees for the ACLS report must be counted among the Vietnam war casualties.