During the period in which Duane Webster led the Association for Research Libraries (ARL), powerful commercial interests sought for their own financial purposes the information resources essential for providing education and performing research. Juxtaposed was the Internet with its inherent capacity to democratizing these resources. Commercial…

Librarians are and will be using cable television technologies to enhance and extend their services. While questions remain in regard to the technology itself, the health and viability of the industry, and government policy, librarians are seeing cable communications as an opportunity to gain credibility and visibility, and also as an extension of…

In a new era of austerity in academic libraries, more realistic concepts of collection building will have to be adopted and new patterns of service will have to be devised. (Author/PF)

ARL is the bimonthly report on research library issues and actions from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). ARL reports on current issues of interest to academic and research library administrators, staff, and users; higher education…

This report on the needs of research libraries with recommendations for improvement is based on minutes of meetings of the Committee on Research Libraries and commissioned papers on topics of major concern. Problems of research libraries involve: (1) increased demands because of rising university population, new business and industrial information…

A 20-year strategic plan for library space has been developed at Cornell University, a private research university which also serves as the land-grant university for the State of New York. Two basic approaches to analyzing space needs were used. The first was the conventional analysis, where collections and user space needs are projected into the…