Discusses the roles and responsibilities of federal and state governments in providing funding for rural public libraries. Highlights include historical background, the Library Services Act and the Library Services and Construction Act, various types of state aid, and a model state plan in Pennsylvania. (LRW)

A mathematical model was used to consider alternative request routing policies for use in the Illinois Library and Information Network. Given data on interlibrary loan demands, the probability of request success, processing and delivery times for various libraries, and a network request routing policy, the model predicted the probability of…