The Role Of The American Library Association In Federal Legislation For Libraries

Leigh, Carma Russell

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1536 Copy

Description

Title

The Role Of The American Library Association In Federal Legislation For Libraries

Author(s)

Leigh, Carma Russell

Issue Date

1966

Keyword(s)

Federal aid to libraries --United States

Abstract

We who administer, implement, or are affected by the federal legislation for libraries enacted in the last ten years are inclined to assume that the federal government's relation to libraries began in 1956 with the passage of the first Library Services Act. Certainly, the impact of federal legislation on libraries has been more strongly felt in the last ten years than in any previous period. Yet a summary of the effects of the federal government through laws and services affecting libraries would have to go back much farther. True, the Constitution of the United States still has nothing whatever to say about libraries, and until 1956 there was nothing in federal statutes expressing concern with the need for adequate library services throughout the states or the intent of assisting the states to provide such services. Yet it must fairly be said that there have long been federal laws affecting library interests that were concerned with such matters as the free importation of books, the distribution of various kinds of government publications, free transportation of books and talking book machines for the blind, and reduced postal rates for books loaned by libraries. In addition to federal laws that provide for these, several federal government functions have long been of direct or indirect benefit to libraries, for example, a wide variety of bibliographic services, a system of interlibrary loans, supplying government publications in large amounts free or at low cost, a system of printed catalog card distribution, and the periodic collection of library statistics.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (13th : 1966)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1536

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1966.

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