The Library of the Fntt/re Has Books                17

revolutionary changes erupting within research libraries. As our
society has been transformed from an industrial society to one in
which over fifty percent of the labor force is employed, in one
form or another, in information and communication services, the
traditional strengths of research libraries have been threatened and
diluted. The development of sophisticated computerized capaci¬
ties for processing information and facilitating rapid communica¬
tions has represented both a threat and a promise to research
libraries and the support of scholarship. The Xerox machine has
transformed the very nature of publishing activities, with the im¬
plications to scholars and libraries not yet fully perceived. The
serious financial pressures of inflation on the traditional labor-
intensive library operations have spurred the profession to a
greater concern for management skills and techniques, and to a
recognition of the potential benefits of applying computer tech¬
nology to create and maintain catalog records.

Despite our best efforts during the past decade, the growth of
the Columbia collections has not kept pace with our former
standards because of severe inflationary pressures, institutional fi¬
nancial constraints and the increasing losses caused by theft and
mutilation. Active participation in cooperatix'c relationships, par¬
ticularly the Research Libraries Group, has placed the University
Libraries in a position of national leadership in planning and de¬
veloping viable programs for resource-sharing, joint preservation
efforts, reciprocal access services, and a computerized national
bibliographical data base. Success in these areas will result in sub¬
stantial control of inflationaty operational costs and thus permit a
greater diversion of available funds to the strengthening of local
collections.

But many of us now recognize that in order to maintain the past
level of collection development, xx'e must actively seek new ways
to protect the collections budget from the uncertain ravages of in¬
flation and in the case of foreign publications, uncontrolled de¬
valuation of the dollar. We hope to design an endowment program