College and Research Libraries By WILLIAM H. CARLSON Coopera~io~: An Historical Review- and a Forecast* Mr. Carlson is director of librariesJ Oregon State System of Higher Education. A DISTINGUISHED characteristic of mod-ern librarianship is that if it is practiced well and efficiently it must be cooperative. Gabriel N au de, one of the first to make librarianship a career, at least in the period of the printed book, recognized and stated this flmdamental necessity in his book, "Avis pour dresser une bibliotheque" first published in 1627. Naude's fourth principle goes in part like this, " ... that by this means (a catalog~e) one may some- times serve and please a friend when one cannot provide him the work he requires, by directing him to the place where he may find a copy as may be easily done with the assistance of these catalogs." 1 This principle, reflecting the instinctive desire of the true librarian to bring book and reader together, wherever the two may be, is at the root of all modern librarian- ship. We like to think, and I believe the facts substantiate the thought, that it. is in America, a land that was largely an un- trammeled wilderness when N aude was formulating his ideas on the organization of libraries, that this root principle has come to its fullest, if not complete, fruition. In 1853, less than o~e hundred years after the attainment of independence by our country, clouds of a possible civil war were hanging heavily over the land. Never- theless those concerned with the production * Paper presented at meeting of University Libraries Section, ACRL, July II, I95I, Chicago. 1 Naude, Gabriel. Advice on Establishing a Library. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1950, p. I2. 5 and use of books were increasingly feeling the need of working together and sharing common problems. A call consequently went out for a conference to be held in New York City. That the need was real is shown by the attendance of eighty-two delegates from a dozen states. Among them was young William F. Poole, whose "Index to Periodicals" was first issued that year. From Yale came Daniel G. 1Gilman, As- sistant Librarian, and from the new Smith- sonian Institution, Librarian Charles C. Jewett. Poole's Index, the forerunner of many periodical indexes, was to grow into a no- table example of early cooperative effort among librarians to be eventually replaced through sheer need and the quickening tempo of research and publishing, by vari- ous and increasingly specialized indexes. Jewett had, as early as r85o, set forth a plan for the formation of a general printed catalog of American Libraries "looking toward the accomplishment of that cherished dream of scholars, a universal catalog." 2 In making this proposal, _clearly based on N aude's fourth principle, he realized the necessity of securing the close cooperation of the libraries of the country and the in- troduction of uniform cataloging ,proce- dures. He foresaw in such cooperation "an aggregate economy," a practical motivating force which has given impetus to library cooperation throughout the years. The war came, as wars so frequently 2 Jewett, Charles C. Report of the Assista·nt Secretary in Charge of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 18so. Senate Miscellaneous Documents, No. x, Special Session, March I8SI, pp. ?8-4I. have, to the detriment of librari~s and other intellectual enterprises, and for some years the times were not propitious for further organized efforts among persons concerned with bookish things. By I876 the nation's most critical war wounds were healing rapidly, and librarians and bibli- ographers were again sensing the compul- sions of meeting their common problems together. The historic conference which we honor and celebrate at this convention was an almost inevitable result. Among the men who gathered in Philadelphia in I 876 to lay the foundation stones of the American Library Association came again William F. Poole, now Librarian of the recently founded Chicago Public Library. · His library, although only four years old, already contained 48,IOO volumes and was growing at the rate of I I,ooo per year. Jus tin Winsor, who came from the Boston Public Library to be elected first president of the Association, was in charge of a col- lection of approximately 300,000 volumes, growing at the rate of I8,ooo volumes per year. He was soon to leave this larger li- brary for the Librarianship of Harvard College, which in I875 had I54,000 volumes in its Library and was increasing at ' the rate of 7,000 volumes per year. In addi- tion there were, on the Harvard campus at that time, thirteen other libraries contain- ing 73,650 volumes. These lusty and rapidly growing libraries, typical of the vigorous intellectual stirrings of I876, were harbingers of things to come but it is doubtful that even Mr. Winsor foresaw that within seventy-five years Har- vard would have over 5,000,000 volumes in its libraries, that it would be adding more books in a single year than were then con- tained in the entire library, and that the maintenance and increase of these large book collections would cost well over one and one-half million dollars annually. Nor is it likely that Mr. Poole envisioned the growth of his young library, within the same time span to 2,200,000 volumes, housed in numerous branches, sub branche3 and stations, and spending half a million dollars annually for new materials. Neither is it probable that either man foresaw the sheer magnitude of the problems of bibli- ographical control which those who were to come after them would so soon have to face . One thing, however, that these two pioneers in librarianship and those who fore- gathered with them were keenly aware of was that the problems that faced them would be solved through cooperation. It is to this will to work together, so much in evidence at this first conference, that we in America owe much of our rapid progress and development in library matters, and similarly it· is the lack of such coopera- tive spirit that has made library develop- ment more difficult in some other countries. Margaret ]. Bates has a statement indica- tive of this, in the Library Journal of a few years ago, when, in comparing the li- braries of Brazil with those of the United States, she says, "I feel that the fundamental difference is a lack of cooperation in Bra- zilian libraries which often leads to clashes of personalities, with serious consequences." 3 A recent discerning foreign interpretation of the nature and need of cooperation among libraries comes from Mr. Kanamori of the National Diet Library of Japan. In the first issue of Biblos, published by his library he says: When I listened to the lectures in the· United States I often heard the words 'democracy' and 'cooperation.' Cooperation means to serve others not losing one's own personal standing. I was attracted more by the word . 'coopera- tion' than by 'democracy.' If you abandon yourself completely it is not cooperation; if you rival with another it is not cooperation either. When I think that the real democracy 3 Library Journal, 70:667, August 1945. 6 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES exists in the respect of one's own self and of others, and in the mutual help, I may safely conclude that cooperation is the most impor- tant element in democracy. 4 Helen Haines, who has for many years been a practitioner of librarianship and who "has been an ornament thereto," recognizes the special place of cooperation in library affairs in this recent statement: "Coopera- tion and fellowship are still the forces that give unity to the great complex library structure of today. They make the bond of personal relationship that I think is stronger than in any other professional call- ing (except, perhaps, the Army) ; a relation- ship that is more diffused now than in the past, but is stiil pervasive and adhesive." 5 Much of the early work of the American Library Association, illustrative of the fore- going quotations, necessarily had to be concerned with such details as card size, cataloging rules and the standardizing of supplies, forms, and furniture. These things were primary, but within the next thirty years there was envisioned, in the papers and proceedings of the Association, I think without exception, all the major concepts and ideas around which our strug- gle for mastery of the records of mankind now revolves. Central cataloging, including printed cards, cooperative indexing of peri- odicals, union catalogs showing the location of books and journals, reservoir or deposit libraries, cooperative buying of books, bibli- ographic centers, regional libraries, these were all foreseen, advocated, and discussed. Among those who saw the pattern of things to come, · and who did much to help it take shape, was E. C. Richardson, of Princeton, and later of the Library of Con- gress. In 1899 in one of his earliest pub- lications he declared that some method 4 Tb id. , 76 : .~ oo. March g. IQ'ii. 5 From a t~lk "Through Time's Bifocals," at a dinner celebrating th e completion of the 2nd edition of her Living wit h B oo ks. As quoted Library of Congres~ "Information Bulletin," January 15 , 1951, p. 2. JANUARY, 1952 whereby · the location of books in various libraries could be found was needed. He emphasized also the need of cooperation in buying in order that libraries would supple- ment, not duplicate, each other and in order too that as great a number of books as possible not already somewhere in this coun- try would be acquired. 6 Richardson gave a lifetime of effort to this basic concept. In its behalf his voice was raised, and ef- fectively raised, again and again, in library counsels, and he lived to see real progress made, on a national scale, in book location if not in book acquisition. In I908 two ideas, which will be central to library work for hundreds of years to come, were advanced. Charles H. Gould, Librarian of McGill University proposed in that year the establishment of regional libraries, whose spheres of operation would embrace the entire continent, each to be the center of a great region, helping the li- braries of its own district, but maintaining a definite cooperative relationship to all other regional libraries. He thought · of these libraries as really international in scope and character. 7 In 1908 W. C. Lane of Harvard brought forward the plan, earlier conceived in part by President Eliot, of the cooperation of libraries for central storage and emphasized the difficulty of knowing where books are located. He suggested setting up a College Library and Lending Bureau to gather bibliographies, catalogs, and other kinds of data on where books are located. He also suggested production of union lists on a variety of subjects and the building up by the Bureau of a collection of books of its own, chiefly working tools and expensive individual works and sets.8 8 Rich~rdson, Ernest C. "Cooperation in Lendin g among Colle ge :>nd Reference Libraries, " L ibrary J our- n al. 2'4 :7 2- ~ 6 . M a y 1899. 7 Go,ld, Ch~rles H. " Regional Libraries," Library ! 01 trnal, 3 -~ : 218-19, June 1908. s L a ne. Willi ::~m C. "A Cen tral Bureau of Informa- tion and Loan Collection for College Libraries," L ibrary l ot{rnal, 33: 4 29-33, November 1908. 7 These proposals for coordination were not advanced as a spot solution of the prob- lems of scholarly libraries, easily to be ar- rived at. The difficulties of putting them into effect, and the time and effort required were clearly foreseen. Thus in rgog Gould, who that year made cooperation the theme of his presidency of the A.L.A., . aid, in his presidential address, "The twentieth century has the task of evolving method and order among rather than with- in libraries." 9 Speaking on coordination at the I gog conference R. R. Bowker, in simi- lar vein, said, "It is an enormous subject this; it is really the subject of the cen- tury .... " 10 Now, as we meet at mid-century, it is appropriate that we· measure and evaluate what progress has been · made with this enormous subject, this subject of the cen- tury. One thing that seems clear from all our cooperative efforts is that they have chiefly been devoted to things which have helped each lilrrary to operate more eco- nomically and efficiently in building itself into as complete and extensive a library, according to institutional needs, as funds and circumstances have permitted. While we have worked together, it has, institution- wise, been for individualistic ends. All our cooperative cataloging, all our union lists and catalogs, and bibliographic centers, even cooperative storage of books, all have con- tributed to the efforts of each library to grow in size, grandeur and research status, to become, all by itself, a proud mecca of the scholarly world. We have only to look at the size of our libraries and the i~plications of their growth rates to bring home these facts. When I entered the library profession a quarter of a century ago the Library of Congress had 3,420,000 volumes and pam- 9 Gould, Charle s H . "Coordination. or Method in Co- operation ," A .L.A . B1~lletin, 3:1 22-2 8, September 1909 . 10 I bid., 3 : I s 6, Sept ember 19 09- phlets, exclusive of a million pieces of music, and numerous other materials. Now it has well over g,ooo,ooo volumes and pamphlets and is adding 3,000,000 more each decade. Harvard University had in its libraries a quarter of a century ago something less than 2,5oo,ooo volumes. Now it has more than 5,ooo,ooo volumes and is growing at the rate of r,6oo,ooo volumes per decade . When the centennial anniversary of the A.L.A. is observed the Library of Congress will, at its present rate of growth, have over r6,ooo,ooo volumes and Harvard will be well on its way to g,ooo,ooo volumes. By the end of this century, if the present growth rates continue, the Library of Con- gress will have 23,000,000 volumes and Harvard will have more than I2,ooo,ooo. By the year 2, roo, a lesser distance into the future than the beginning of Harvard University is into the past, the Library of Congress will have grown to 53,000,000 volumes and Harvard to 24,000,000 vol- umes. By the year 3 ,ooo, no farther in to the future than the Norman invasion is into the past, the Library of Congress will, by present counts and standards, have 323,000,000 volumes, and Harvard will have I 7o,ooo,ooo, requiring respectively 8, 7 50 and 4,6oo linear miles of shelving. The present few hundred miles of books in these two libraries will then be a small part indeed of their total holdings. These figures, for two of our greatest li- braries, are symptomatic only and will, if things bibliographical continue as they are in the present era, be dupli~ated in varying degree by numerous other libraries, en- dowed and state supported. Even the culturally young State of Oregon, with a population of only one and one-half mil- lions, now has in the libraries of its state supported institutions of higher learning more than 850,000 volumes. These are modest figures, in comparison to the two 8 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES large libraries used illustratively above, but by I 976 the Oregon libraries will, at their present rate of increase of 324,000 volumes per decade, have doubled their volume con- tent and contain approximately r,6oo,ooo volumes. At the century's end they will contain about 2, 7oo;ooo volumes, and by the year 3,000 they will have reached 32,400,000. Books enough, and more than enough, it would seem, for one common- wealth to gather in support of research and the higher education of its youth. During my quarter of a century in li- brarianship there have been a good many predictions of the suffocation of mankind in his intellectual excreta, some fanciful, but all certainly, as the foregoing growth prospects emphasize, having a sound basis in fact. Many of us, as we have read or heard these predictions have thought of them as some- thing in the far distant future with which neither we nor our children's children need have undue concern. Unfortunately, the fecundity of the human mind and the ef- ficiency of our printing .presses does not permit any such comfortable passing of the problem to the future. The time of begin- ning suffocation, at least quantitatively and financially, is here and now. This is shown clearly in the never· ending quest of our great libraries, and indeed of all our li- braries, for more and more miles of shelving. It is evident too in the financial gaspings of our libraries. Keyes Metcalf of Harvard is one of those who have pointed up the problem in a number of places. In a recent issue of College and Research Libraries he says: The gravity of the situation in many universi- ties can be described bluntly: If libraries continue to grow as in the past, and if we have a reasonably stable economy and income, one or more professors will have to be dropped each year in order to keep the library going. This is certainly intolerable and can- not be defended if we are now spending JdNUdRYJ 1952 enough for our : libraries. We must decide what percentage · of total expenditures the library should take and try to stick to that figure. We shall have to find a way out of our dilemma. 11 Unfortunately, from the standpoint of checking growth rate, not even an unstable economy has had a seriously retarding effect. At the beginning of my quarter century in library work our country and the world was just recovering from the greatest war in all history. Early in my career we and the world were plunged into the most severe economic depression that has ever been experienced, to be followed by a second World War which in destructiveness viciousness, and costs in blood, sweat, tears: and money dwarfed the first. Yet it has been precisely in this period of strife and turmoil and uncertainty that our libraries have made such phenomenal growth, re- sulting in a doubling, or more than a doubling, of their resources. If the growth of the libraries of our larger universities is now choking off one professor per year and somewhat less in the universities not so large, how many will be choked off when these libraries contain the g,ooo,ooo volumes that Harvard will have by 1976, or its r2,ooo,ooo volumes by the end of this century, or the 24,0oo,ooo vol- umes of the year 2100, or the r7o,ooo,ooo volumes on 4,600 miles of shelves in the year 3,000? Mathematically this situation has within itself the solution of the problem. Every professor choked off will mean a few less monographs and less journal articles too until the situation finally comes into natural balance. A predictive law or formula can no doubt be devised which will show, on a definite mathematical basis, more and more librarians and bibliographers in proportion to professors, until finally, perhaps, by the 11 .Metcalf, Keyes D. "A Proposal for a Northeastern Regtonal Ltbrary," College and Research Libraries 11 • 238, July 1950. ' · 9 year three or four thousand, all the intel- lectual workers will be librarians and none will be professors. When this point is reached suffocation will be complete and the growth .problem will have been solved since the librarians themselves will be so busy tending their numerous holdings that they will not, as does our present generation, have time to themselves add extensive.ly to the writings on their endless shelves. Such an absurdity will, of course, never be reached as long as man continues to justify the name of homo sapiens. There will be common sense and wit enough to constructively solve the di- lemma. In considerable part this may well be done along the lines suggested at the turn of the present century by the leading li- brarians then active. The deposit storage library, once hope- fully looked to, is, of course, no solution at all as it merely complicates matters by physi- cal location of the books owned by a library in some distant building. The subject spe- cialization of libraries, arranged locally and regionally, and to which some conferences were devoted in World War II and the pre- world war period, has offered only scanty relief, since areas of specialization have not, in general, been clearly delimited or closely adhered to. The plan to get into the libraries of this country one copy of every book published abroad, first suggested and actively pro- moted by E. C. Richardson, and now known as and going forward as the Farmington plan, works both ways. By promoting spe- cialization it spreads the burden and volume growth somewhat among libraries. To the extent that it does this effectively it in- creases the unique title count of our li- braries. The national library resources in the aggregate thereby become more com- plete, and if the libraries with Farmington specialties should rigidly forego acquisition in their non-subject specialties there would be a true spreading of the burden. Up to the moment, however, it seems quite cer- tain that the libraries participating in the Farmington plan are not refr; ining from acquisition in those subject areas allocated to other libraries. They are probably, to a considerable extent, pursuing their Farm- ington specialties i_n addition to the regular selection and buying programs which are piling their resources up into such fantastic volume counts. Bibliographical centers and union cata- logs, arrived at by so much cooperative effort and planning, are no. help either in solving the growth problems of our li- braries. They do, of course, to the credit of modern librarianship, make our libraries and the book apparatus of the world gen- erally much more useful and efficient by telling us quickly, although expensively, where the books are. The efforts toward international bibliographic control that have been struggled with unsuccessfully but val- iantly for the past fifty years and more are an extension of the union catalog principle to all literature. This control problem, which is now occupying UNESCO so ex- tensively, did not yield when the mass of material to be recorded was much less than it is now and it does not, in spite of united, cooperative attack, yield readily now. The best minds of the bibliographical world have thus far made discouragingly little progress in overcoming barriers of language, custom, vested bibliographical priorities and practices and nationalistic pride. Success of these sincere and .painstaking efforts toward cooperation and progress will, to the extent that it is achieved, only aggravate the growth problems of our libraries, since the better the controls the larger the number of publications which we will learn of and which we will, by present standards, feel that we should have in our libraries. 10 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES The organizational mastery of our writ- ten records through the miracles of elec- tronics, which gives bright promise of suc- cess, while it may and probably will make our libraries more efficient will certainly do little to overcome the suffocating effects of the rabbit-like multiplication of the world's written records. Through rapid selectors and similar gadgets we may be able to quickly place before a scholar all the litera- ture pertinent to a subject. The coding of such rna terials, taking the place of our present alphabetical subject controls, will require ever more careful, expert study and analysis on the part of the catalogers, in- dexers, and bibliographers. Again the re- sult will inevitably be that more and more of the intellectual workers in a field will be busy keeping track of the records and fewer and fewer with productive scholarship. Here too a definite formula may be possible to calculate the time when the literature is so massive that everyone will be busy taking care of it, and no one will have time to produce it. Only in the idea of regional libraries, put forward by Gould early in this century does there seem to be growth relief for the in- dividual library. We do now have, here in the great heartland of America, an embry- onic regional library, and another such li- brary for the Northeastern States is in the talking and planning stage. The plans afoot for the Midwest Inter-Library Center require, for the first time in American Li- brarianship, that each of the cooperating libraries shall, in the words of Mr. Kan- arnori, abandon a little of itself to a central agency. This will be done by releasing title to materials, painstakingly and expensively gathered and organized, and sending them to the Center. Important and different in this plan is the fact that the Center will, contrary to the New England deposit li- brary, dispose of duplicate sets of little tised JANUARY~ 1952 I materials. Important in the proposed pro- gram of the Center and also new in the area of cooperative effort, are the plans of the Center for a positive acquisition program of its own to round out incomplete sets and rnaterialsP An important and logical cor- ollary to this program will be, if the plan is to make sense, that the extensive duplicative efforts among the cooperating libraries will cease. A number of electronic devices already exist through which the image of the printed or written page can be transmitted at tre- mendous speeds. As the great promise of these gadgets is realized, more and more of the multi-million volumes which are con- sidered essential for advanced study and for research can be in a central library such as the Midwest Inter-Library Center. If this assumption is correct then more and more of the fantastic volume increase of the rec- ords of mankind will be found in regional, or perhaps national libraries, of which the Midwest Center is a progenitor. Less and less books will be required on campuses or in special institutional libraries. This will mean that our university libraries, Harvard, Yale, Illinois, Columbia, California and hundreds more, can, by abandoning to the Center more and more of themselves and, more significantly, their active acquisition programs, meet the need of the scholar and graduate student of their institutions with campus libraries of a few hundred thousand volumes, or at the most, a million volumes·. Nor is it rash to assume that they will meet them better and more completely than they now do with their rnulti-rnillioned libraries. The ultimate logic of the regional or na- tional library idea, dictated by the economy and efficiency, will shift the burden of main- taining libraries of ten or fifteen or five 12 E sterquest, Ralph T . "Progress Report on the Mid- west Inter-Library Center," College and R esearch L i- braries, 12 :67- 70, January 1951. 11 hundred million volumes from numerous institutional libraries to a few cooperative super libraries. The student or scholar at the smallest cooperating institution will then have at his command the same biblio- graphical resources as the student or scholar of the largest one. Many libraries can then reverse their volume counts and an- nounce, with the same satisfaction that we now annually note the increase of our li- braries, a decrease and further shifting of resources from the campus to a center. Few of us now active, including this writer, will welcome this merging of the distinctive contributions, strength and in- dividuality of our libraries into such a com- mon Center. It may be safely predicted that some generations of librarians, and of deans, presidents, trustees, legislators, gov- ernors, and alumni too, will need to fade away before these things come to complete fruition. The sheer mass of the writings of mankind, reflected by the quantitative growth prospects facing our libraries, under present standards and methods of operation dictates, nevertheless, that some kind of centralization of book resources shall come to pass, however painfully. One facet of the amazing growth of our writings which we of this generation have brushed but lightly and which the learned world of the future, in its entirety, will have to come seriously to grips with, is ways and means of discarding and sloughing off those writings which no longer have rel- evance and value to present or future gen- erations. We of the current era still stand somewhat in awe of our writings. In spite of the vast number of volumes in our li- braries we still consider the printed page as something sacred deserving to be preserved somewhere. The feeling and philosophy that everything written should come into our libraries and be there preserved has been at the central core of our twentieth century librarianship. It is evident in the all in- clusive canons of selection of our larger li- braries, in our papers read at conventions, in our annual reports, and in our concern to preserve, in a region or in the nation, at least one copy of every book. Future gen- erations faced with central libraries of hun- dreds of millions of volumes will increas- ingly and necessarily lay a heavy hand, not only on current prints, but on much that has gone before. Wholesale discarding of printed ma- terials, finally and irrevocably, is now the rankest kind of bibliographical heresy. Imagine, however, the librarians of the year 3000, when the Library of Congress will by present standards have over three .hundred million volumes on 8,750 miles of shelving. Should these future librarians have let their libraries accumulate to this extent, which they will not if they are wise, may they not conclude in desperation that of the small segment of 240 miles of books added to the Library of Congress in the ancient years up to 1950, 200 miles can be safely discarded and that of the I ,ooo miles plus of volumes added in the period I95D-2IOO, even if they are present in micro-reduction, the equiva- · lent of 8oo miles can be discarded? Without some such extensive elimination of books, which like corals have lived for awhile, served their purpose and then been . absorbed into the foundation of future growth, civilization will indeed be in danger of intellectual suffocation. This is not at all a problem of the physical size of books or miles of shelving but of the capacity of the collective human mind, and we must as- sume that long before the year 3000 birth control will be in universal and successful application, to use more than a portion of the record . Numerous publications standing on the shelves of our libraries today could immediately disappear into final and com- plete oblivion without any appreciable loss 12 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES to society. As our wntmgs multiply and fructify this will be increasingly true. I predict that by the year 2000, which a ' good many here will live to see, serious and strenuous efforts to permanently and finally discard many publications will be under way, and that the librarians then active will not worry about retaining a last copy some- where. A Shaw list of books that no longer deserve to live and to be accorded housing and organization, or only organization, if housing is no longer an obstacle, may well be undertaken by some group of librarians not too far removed from the present . .If so their task will be infinitely more difficult and complex than our present relatively un- questioning pack-rat emphasis on getting all the books published into libraries some- where. Not too far into the future, possibly in the lifetime of persons here present, som~ courageous librarian will, I believe, set up a discarding division in his library, equal in staff and financial support to the acquisi- tions division. A good many efforts to foresee the biblio- graphical future are now included among the numerous materials in our libraries. Some of these have been amusing, imagina- tive and provocative/ 3 some constructive and balanced, 14 and some half-baked and lacking in perception. 1 5 My own thought is that whatever miracles come to pass through electronics, the current working library of the future will revolve around some form of the codex book which has been in use the past 500 years. Supplementing and aiding codex books and journals, attractively pro- duced and easily holdable in the hand, will be millions upon millions of relatively little 13 Hardin, Garrett. "The Last Canute," Scientific Mon t 1•lv, 7 2 : 203-o 8 , Sentember 11146. 14 Silver, H. M. "Books in Cans and Envelopes," Pacifi c Spectator, 4 : 4 04-10, Autumn 1950. 15 Walker, Fred L. Jr. "Blue Pr int for Knowledge," S cientifi c Mo nthly , 7 2 :9 0 -IOI, February 19 51 . JANUARY~ 1952 used volumes, carefully weeded and, no doubt, micro-reduced. By the year 3000 our books may well be recorded in some simple universal language. They will more and more, particularly in technical and scientific fields, be written by teams of project or research workers, with- out individual authors, along the pattern be- ginning to emerge in World War II. Most of the untold millions of micro-reduced pub- lications, will be available in a few great na- tional and world libraries, in which and through which the significant writings of the world will be indexed, abstracted, and coded along universally agreed upon prin- ciples. A much larger percentage of the intellectual workers of the world than is now needed will be required to keep this · vast bibliographical apparatus streamiined and functioning easily. High among the responsibilities of these workers will be care- ,ful selection and discarding of unessential and trivial materials. Then as now, the literature of the world pertinent to any sub- ject or any phase of it will be readily placed before the productive scholar or government or international worker or advanced stu- dent. These things can come into being only through an extension of the will to work cooperatively together, so prevalent among the founders of the A.L.A. and in our pres- ent generation. When and if they occur the fourth princiole set forth bv N au de in the ancient year of 1627. although probably only faintly discernible among all the ma- chinery and gadgets, will still govern. In these distant times librarians and bibliog- raphers will still, by these means, the books and catalogs at their disposal, however pro- duced and organized, seek to · serve and please a friend by directing him to the works he requires. 13