on mutual interest in servicing the ultimate consumer, namely, the reader. Mr. Chairman, if I were asked what was perhaps the essential element of American democracy and of American greatness, I would say that that element was probably equality of access to educational facilities, initial instruction in the first place, equal access to sources of information, and the parallel responsibilities to act on these sources of information in forming one's opinion and acting upon it at the polls. As Mr. McGrath pointed out so well, education does not cease at the seventh grade or at the twelfth grade or at the end of college or at the end of securing a graduate degree. Education goes on through life. Beyond the mere instruction which one is compelled by one's local laws or by one's parents or by the social forces of the community to undergo, every citizen needs to have access all through his life to sources of information. The library is, as far as we know, the best method of providing access to the individual citizen to sources of information which are within his own control. The need for information is recognized and has been responded to by a plethora of informational media, the magazines, the technical bulletins, the Government bulletins and so on, but these are not, generally speaking, within the control of the individual citizen at his beck and call at the moment that he needs the information or the other values of literary material. For business purposes, for information about the country itself, its history, its institutions, the great men, the local history of the country, one cannot expect to be spoon-fed out of a local newspaper, out of the Nation-wide circulation magazine, or from a bulletin which comes automatically from a Government department or from a State agency. For the purpose of the individual, for the information that he wants when he needs it and at the time he needs it, a library facility is necessary. I would say, sir, that in the light of the leadership which the United States has taken in providing educational facilities to all its citizens, the great lead which the United States early made in this line, the fact that one-fifth of our counties are now lacking in the facilities which make this educational processing beyond instruction in the whole life is not only deplorable but probably intolerable. I would like to make another point here from the particular point of view of the Library of Congress. As I said, the Library of Congress has no administrative arrangements or relationships with the other libraries or with library supervisory bodies, State agencies throughout the country. Our arrangements are entirely informal and based upon what we can give to them, what they can give to us, entirely in the interest of the ultimate consumer. Nevertheless, in spite of the informality of these arrangements, the libraries of the country do form in a sense a system. There are the larger State and university libraries, and then finally there are some certain libraries whose size and the quality of their collections make them outstanding, almost unique in the country. I mention here collections like those of the Army Medical Library, the Department of Agriculture, Harvard, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and a few others. This may seem to have no relation to the small community library in a county whose livelihood is based, let's say, exclusively on agriculture, but there is a very direct connection. Just as the bulletins of the Department of Agriculture are to a large extent useless to a farmer unless he has a local intermediary, the county agent, a man who can call his attention to what information, what services, what loans, for example, are available, so the library facilities of the country don't become available to the local reader unless he has a local intermediary, namely his local librarian. Just to give you an example of this, we do a rather large business in the Library of Congress in the way of interlibrary loans. We don't lend to individuals outside of certain officials to whom we are required to loan, but we will lend to libraries, to any library. Actually, libraries don't demand too heavily from us because a small library in California, for example, would much rather see first if they can borrow a book from the State library before they go all the way east and ask the Library of Congress. Nevertheless, our interlibrary loans are a considerable proportion of our business. Last year there was established in Missouri a county library where none had existed before. We had never, so far as we know, received a request for an interlibrary loan from a county or from anybody in that county. Almost immediately, however, after this county library system was established and the bookmobiles began going out and services became known, we began to get quite a number of requests for loans of books not only to the county library but to the State library which had been called upon in its turn by the county library. Consequently, I want to make the point that the very small, the very minor sums which under the provisions of this bill will go to stimulate the provision of library services in rural areas, will not merely pay for those services which are locally provided, but actually at the same time integrate those communities into what is really a Nation-wide system. By giving the local community an intermediary between himself and the rest of the country in the form of a local librarian, you are making all these other things available to him. This opportunity I think is away in excess of the comparative small sums provided by the bill, and I am very happy again from the rather peculiar point of view of the Library of Congress, which has nothing to do with local library services except in this round-about way, to endorse the bill, sir. Mr. TACKETT. Thank you. Mr. Howell? Mr. HOWELL. I don't believe I have any questions. Mr. TACKETT. Mr. Potter? Mr. POTTER. Mr. Clapp, we are confronted with a very real problem in this Congress of trying to make both ends meet. I will grant you that the sum of $7.5 million is small compared to most sums that we have to deal with. There are many people who feel that the Federal Government is no different than the average family, that it can't continue to spend more money than it is taking in. I know that this bill will be challenged on the floor, if it reaches the floor, by that very argument. Agreeing that it is a bill that is worth while, where would you recommend that we cut down expenditures to take care of this $7.5 million? Mr. CLAPP. I think, under given circumstances, I might be able to find the place to cut down expenditures. This is hypothetical. Directly on the point, sir, whether I think this $7.5 million is a justifiable additional expense to the Federal Government at the present time when we are finding it hard to make ends meet-I would like to speak directly to that rather than to the possibility of saving elsewhere. Mr. Chairman and Mr. Potter, I believe that the average American chews every year something like $6 worth of chewing gum. The average American smokes every year an average of $16 worth of cigarettes. I don't have the figures handy for cigars or liquor. I think that a country which is wealthy enough to chew up $5 or $6 worth of chicle every year, which is wealthy enough to smoke up three times that amount of agricultural and industrial products, can afford to make to the population which produces these things, among other circumstances, the necessary ingredients for access to information. Mr. POTTER. I can well agree with you, but it would be most difficult to campaign on that. Mr. CLAPP. I don't think so, sir. I would like to go some time- me. Mr. CLAPP. On the chicle, I don't chew chewing gum. My children all do. But I do smoke cigarettes, and yet I would be willing to cut down my consumption of cigarettes, sir, in order to get library service. Mr. POTTER. I can well appreciate that point, but I did raise the question because it is the real question in this bill. If you could bring this bill into our foreign-aid program, it would pass in a minute. Do you suppose we could work that, Boyd? Mr. TACKETT. I would be willing. Mr. POTTER. Thank you very much. Mr. TACKETT. Thank you. Mr. Harold F. Brigham, president, public libraries division, American Library Association. STATEMENT OF HAROLD F. BRIGHAM, PRESIDENT, PUBLIC LIBRARIES DIVISION, AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION Mr. BRIGHAM. Mr. Chairman, may I offer a statement that I would like to hold to in order to save time or shall I just leave it here with you? Mr. TACKETT. Just put it there, and you can use it in your testimony if you care to. Mr. BRIGHAM. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I am director of the Indiana State Library, my immediate position, and in our library is the State extension agency which would be directly identified with this bill at the State level. I am here as the official representative of the American Library Association, its executive board particularly, at the request of the president of the association, Mrs. Fyan. I took time night before last to try to put on paper as succinctly as I could the principal arguments I could think of in favor of this bill, not leaning on the literature necessarily that I could have reached, but recalling the important points in so much of that literature and then trying to condense my own convictions to the important points which I felt sure the gentlemen of this committee would wish to consider. Those points I have put in this statement. I have broken them down into two parts, one relating to what I have called the basic need, and the other the point of justification now in spite of conditions such as those Mr. Potter was just referring to. I will hold pretty close to the statement. Under basic need; the provision of effective library service for all the people is a national concern, as well as a State and local concern. Public libraries serve school children and youth of all ages, but even more significantly they provide for adults the only free tax-supported opportunity to continue education throughout life. This is the American library tradition, and it is so because education for citizenship and personal development is the tradition of American democracy. The American Library Association for a generation or more has devoted special efforts to the strengthening of the thousand and more little libraries, and the establishment of library service in unserved areas. These efforts have concentrated in the rural areas of the country where these two needs were to be found almost exclusively. In all this time comparatively little progress has been made. We still have more than a thousand little, struggling libraries in small towns, needing help if they are to render effective service. We still have a thousand or more rural townships and counties with no local service at all. On that last statement, a thousand or more rural townships and counties, let me interpolate, I meant to try to get the exact figures but hadn't the time, but in my own State of Indiana there are slightly more than 500 townships which do not have any local service. I know in Michigan Mr. POTTER. Located within the township, you mean? Mr. BRIGHAM. Yes; located within the towhship. I know that is so in Illinois, I know it is so in Kentucky where I formerly lived, and I know it is true in Tennessee where I also served in a library. A national plan for the solution of this national problem was developed by the American Library Association in 1948, based on an exhaustive study of all factors involved. One of the principal conclusions of this plan was that local tax sources could not be expected to support effective library service without supplementation, and that this supplementation should come both from the State and from the Federal Government. In this way there could be ultimately good library service for all the people, with such integration of services that people in small. communities and rural areas would have access to the resources of larger libraries as well as convenient access to their own local libraries. Let me interpolate here, if I may, a second conclusion that came out of that national plan which is in print and is the guide for libraries in this postwar period. The map on the wall is a new item of information. That map with its wide-open spaces shows those towns, communities, or counties actually which have what may be considered a basis for good library service. They have a basis for what is called good minimum library service. In this national plan the conclusion I refer to is that in order to give good library service or reasonably good service, a community should have a population of 25,000 people, and it should have a minimum income for library purposes to the amount recognized today as $40,000; 25,000 population and $40,000 income to provide service to those 25,000 people. These red areas or communities show the number in the country that have a basis for good minimum library service. It shows by the wideopen white spaces the large number of communities in the whole country which do not have that kind of base for service. It boils down to these figures, actually: There are 372 such communities in the whole country. I think that figure will surprise librarians as well as nonlibrarians. Of the 372 there are 249 cities. Two hundred and forty-nine of them are cities, most of them larger cities, of course. The others are either counties or what we call municipal and country arrangements, counties served by the large city in the county, usually the county seat. Of those there are 78 which are county libraries; there are 42 which are municipal county arrangements. There are three regional libraries in the whole country. There are 302 such communities. Mr. TACKETT. You mean there are only 372 libraries in the United States? Mr. BRIGHAM. No. There are 372 which, according to this national plan, Mr. Chairman, met what would be called a good standard for support of a reasonably good library service. As I remember it, there are six-thousand-four-hundred-some-odd public libraries in the whole country. I think that figure is correct from the American Library Directory. Mr. POTTER. Will you explain the reason for the State of California being so far ahead of the other States? Do they have a good State program? Mr. BRIGHAM. It is basically a State-wide set-up in California. It is on a county basis. The libraries of California are ahead in that they have developed county libraries more completely than any other State. Mr. POTTER. Are they supported by the State or is it part State and part county funds? Mr. BRIGHAM. I can get the figure of county support in California to see what the actual State support is. It is based on county income and municipal income alone, according to the figures I have for California. There are large counties in California, compared with Indiana with its 92 counties. We couldn't begin to have a library income of at least $40,000 in our Indiana counties with local income alone, at the maximum allowable tax for library purposes. Shall I proceed? The library-services bill which is before the Congress goes directly to the heart of the whole problem. It would provide the means to bring about "the further development of public library service in rural areas," and it would encourage and stimulate the State governments to do their part. There is a special justification for the proposed concentration of effort to develop service in rural areas. It resides in rural people themselves, in the people of America who live on farms and in small towns. They have made our large cities, by constant migration to them. They have furnished a very high percent of the leaders to be found in cities, in State governments, in national enterprises of all kinds, including, of course, the National Government. And rural people somehow seem to have a keener appreciation of such opportunities as a public library offers. They use the libraries well when they have libraries. The unfortunate thing is that rural people need better library service than they ordinarily have, and all too many have no library service at all. Justification for the bill itself and proof of the need it is designed to meet are probably less critical concerns to Members of the Congress than justification of passage of a new revenue bill now, in the face |