Discusses a method of evaluating public library systems development in metropolitan areas with regard to four aspects: financial systems, interlibrary cooperation, new uses and services, and technical developments. The method was first proposed by the Urban Library Study Project of the Toronto Public Libraries. (Author/FM)

This examination of the problems and opportunities of system organization from the viewpoint of public libraries provides a perspective on the growth of library networks, their administration, and the pressures that opposed their development in the 1970's. It identifies the requirements for their further development, and looks at the need for new…

Recognizing that the major technical direction of this decade is toward proximity of computing function to its users, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) is moving to distribute its processing capabilities. The goals of this study were to formulate an architecture for an RLG distributed system, to identify pre-existing components appropriate for…