College and Research Libraries


WILLIAM A. MOFFETT TOWARD THE 
WHITE HOUSE 

CONFERENCE 
AND BEYOND 

College Libraries and 
a National Information Policy: 

Whistling in the Graveyard 

An informal survey of college librarians on a national information policy in-
dicated a variety of responses, ranging from lack of knowledge, indif-
ference, and confusion to enthusiasm. Among concerns and fears expressed 
were the belief that national programs would be dominated by other parts 
of the information community, that larger bureaucracies would be de-
veloped, that regional and local cooperative plans might be subverted, that 
college librarians would be asked to play roles incompatible with their cam-
pus missions, and that they would be closed out from the benefits of na-
tional networking. 

I AM PLEASED to offer some brief comments 
about the college librarian's perspective on 
the developing national information policy. 
In doing so, I feel obliged to let you in on a 
practical joke that was played on me here 
last night. The joke was not in very good 
taste-few practical jokes are-and I speak 
of it now, not only because someone obvi-
ously went to such great effort to perpetrate 
it, but because it expresses, albeit in a 
crude way, a concern that nagged me as I 
first began to consider my assignment. 

I had been asked by the chairperson to 
determine, first of all, whether there was a 
college perspective-a set of attitudes 
among librarians serving mainly undergrad-
uate institutions-that was distinct from that 
of the resear:ch libraries; and, secondly, if 
there were a college perspective, what bear-
ing it might have on the academic librarian's 
role in shaping a national information pol-

William A. Moffett is director of libraries, 
State University of New York, College at 
Potsdam. ' 

22 I 

icy. Thus charged, I set out to discover 
what expectations and anxieties were being 
aroused by the emergence of a national 
network. 

I decided at the outset to go to as many 
practicing librarians as I could and invite 
them to share their concerns with me. And 
rather than speak mainly from our experi-
ences in the Northeast, I determined to ex-
tend my inquiry into all fifty states if I could 
and direct it to both large and small col-
leges, both private and public institutions, 
and of the latter, both state and commun-
ity-supported. 

As it happened, I fell in about that time 
with a fellow up my way who fancies him-
self a futurist and who . has found it amusing, 
when we meet, to ply me with his apocalyp-
tic vision of the librarian's future-or rather 
the lack of it. You've been treated to it too, 
I know: how the book is becoming obsolete 
and how the academic library is about to go 
the way of the dodo and the passenger 
pigeon. 

He dismissed my plan to poll other librar-
ians on grounds of its sheer futility. College 

j 



, 
librarians are a doomed species, he con-
tended, doubly dead because they are 
unwilling to grasp the reality of changes al-
ready underway and, for all their talk, inca-
pable of genuinely intelligent efforts to an-
ticipate the consequences. 

Some weeks later, by which time I had 
pursued my inquiry with scores of col-
leagues in New York and had written nearly 
300 college librarians across the country, my 
futurist acquaintance encountered me again 
and asked what I was learning. I told him 
that responses were only beginning to come 
in and, as much to put him off as anything, 
said that the only new information I had 
discovered so far had come from preparing a 
mailing list of head librarians, and that was 
that a disproportionately large number of 
college library directors were named james! 
(Incidentally, I must leave it to someone 
else to speculate why that should be true, 
.<iS indeed it seems to be.) 

My reference to directors only set him off 
again, for if he had a poor opinion of the li-
brarian's capacity to prepare for the future, 
he professed to have even less regard for 
library directors as a class. "Don't you 
know," he argued, "they are too preoc-
cupied with things like leaky roofs and chur-
lish professors and staffing cuts to think 
about national issues? And as for their ex-
pectations of the future," he went on, "they 
are too wrapped up in day-to-day problems 
of survival to be of any help to you: half of 
them don't expect to be around in 1990, 
much less 2001. You're writing to people 
who have one foot in the ground." 

I did assure him that the academic librar-
ians I knew were not nearly so dead as all 
that. I did in fact make some effort to de-
scribe the ambitious efforts the profession is 
making to anticipate a full-scale "post-
industrial, information society" and to con-
vince him that we, too, had a futurist vision 
and were doing something about it. 

But it was not a serious discussion any-
way, just lighthearted banter over morning 
coffee. There would be no reason for recall-
ing any of his remarks at all except that 
when I checked into my hotel last night, I 
found waiting for me a package containing 
what was obviously meant to be his last 
word on the subject. It was in fact written 
on a stone-a tombstone, no less. I brought 

College Libraries I 23 

it over with me. On one side of this vener-
able slab you will find that it simply says 
"JAMES." On the other is penciled a famil-
iar expression posed as a grudging question: 
"Not dead, but sleeping?" 1 

As an epitaph for this generation of 
academic library leadership, or even as an 
appropriate question to raise with regard to 
the emerging network and the necessity of 
developing a national information policy, my 
acquaintance's joke surely misses the mark. 
And yet, there were times this spring when, 
I confess, a similar question had occurred to 
me. Let me characterize some of the re-
sponses to my inquiries in order to estab-
lish, if there is one, the college perspective. 

INDIFFERENCE AND IGNORANCE 

At the outset, I must say that a number 
of college librarians whom one might have 
expected to be concerned about the national 
network and national policy questions seem, 
for whatever reasons, to be to all appear-
ances quite contentedly asleep-and maybe 
even dead. There were many who were ob-
viously not familiar with the National Com-
mission on Libraries and Information Sci-
ence report or even with the much pub-
licized six-point program . drafted by the 
Kaser committee last year. 2 

There was evidence of indifference, as 
well as of the predictable preoccup;1tion 
with local issues that clearly makes a discus-
sion of national policies a luxury for many 
hard-pressed college librarians. And there 
were those colleagues who replied, in words 
something like this: 

Sir: I have delayed responding to your questions 
in order to give our library faculty an opportunity 
to include their ideas. Unfortunately they have 
none. Yours truly, James Such & Such . 

I even uncovered one or two corre-
spondents capable of denouncing the very 
idea of a national network as "a wild dream" 
and a "new toy," and one who grumbled 
that it was too soon to talk of such things. 
But these, I must stress, represe.nted only a 
tiny fraction of my sample. 

CONFUSION 

More importantly, there was considerable 
confusion. Partly, I think, this resulted from 
the ambiguity in the literature itself, and 



24 I College & Research Libraries • january 1979 

the way in which discussion of the national 
information program of services and of the 
national network (whose task will be to de-
liver and coordinate that program) and of 
the national information policy (that will 
guide and inform the program) get all mixed 
together. 

Some of my correspondents, no doubt 
because of the very way in which I posed 
my questions, were much readier to discuss 
the practical implications of networking and 
to speculate on the likely effects of the 
White House Conference than to get into 
the more theoretical and elusive issues of 
public policy. A great number of these 
writers were quite forceful, even eloquent, 
in articulating their expectations of the 
network-and their fears. Indeed, if the 
great majority of college librarians are not 
sleeping, it may be because they are too 
worried to sleep. 

CONCERNS 

First of all, they're worried about the 
White House Conference. They see it 
dominated by other parts of the information 
community, especially advocates for public 
and school library interests. They find their 
own priorities are often not reflected in the 
preliminary recommendations of the various 
governors' conferences-indeed, are being 
drowned in the clamor for funds raised by 
some of the more vocal participants. On 
balance, they foresee little good coming out 
of the same kind of conference held at the 
national level and possibly some harm. 

Second, they're deeply mistrustful that 
we may wind up with yet greater bureau-
cracies to contend with, either in the cen-
tralized coordination of the network or in 
the proposed federal office of information 
policy. The specter of more red tape frankly 
horrifies them. 

Moreover, many are apprehensive that 
the planners of the national network, espe-
cially as they address the need for a better 
document delivery system, may take steps 
that will subvert the successful operation of 
local and regional systems of cooperation 
long in the making. They argue that the ap-
plication of the same emphasis on cen-
tralization and standardization that is admit-
tedly vital to data base access, especially in 
the generation and retrieval of reliable bib-

liographic data, could be the ruination of 
existing cooperative loan programs. They 
want reassurance that the design of the na-
tional network will reflect the fundamental 
premise that its usefulness as a network 
must be measured by its usefulness to the 
individual library. 

Not unlike their counterparts in the re-
search and special libraries, the college li-
brarians see themselves being asked to play 
roles basically incompatible with their cam-
i:JUS missions. They foresee genuine and 
perhaps irreconcilable conflicts in attempt-
ing to serve both their own users and a 
wider community of information seekers. 
Many of them cannot quite see an equalizer 
in the increased access that may be made 
available to their own patrons. 

Then, too, they're apprehensive about 
that catch phrase, "freedom of information." 
They do not take seriously the notion that 
access can be literally free-that is, without 
cost; and virtually none of them seems to 
have bought the idea, implicit in the ALA 
president's program, that the federal gov-
ernment could, should, or would pick up 
the tab for such costs. 

The concern for cost, moreover, seems to 
manifest itself rather differently for the col-
leges than it does for larger academic librar-
ies. There's a very widespread assumption, 
especially in the medium and small college 
libraries, that they will simply be closed out 
of the benefits of national networking. Al-
though this is somewhat less true in the 
case of those who have had good experi-
ences in regional networks or local consor-
tia, there is the general impression, even in 
the case of units of state-supported college 
systems and inescapably in the case of 
community colleges and small, private col-
leges, that the smaller institutions are des-
tined to remain have-nots; that they will 
have less, rather than greater, access to in-
formation as it becomes inc~easingly borne 
by electronic devices. 

One community college librarian wrote, 
in a memorable literary non sequitur: "My 
feeling is that a national network is a Utopia 
reserved for the giants in the library world, 
and one to which the Lilliputians may never 
be admitted." This pessimism may not be 
well-founded, but it is real, and it is wide-
spread. 



Even in the larger undergraduate col-
leges, both public and private, there is a 
sense of this same foreboding. It most fre-
quently expresses itself as a kind of aliena-
tion, a sense of isolation. I detected a readi-
ness to be involved but a recognition that 
the college librarian somehow stands be-
yond the circle of key decision makers and 
does not know quite how to step inside. 

ENTHUSIASM AND IMPATIENCE 

I have been deliberately stressing some of 
the anxieties I encountered in the course of 
my project, including some anxieties that I 
myself do not share. I have done so because 
some of you seem not to be aware of them 
and . because others of you will be encour-
aged to hear your worries voiced. 

But I should go on to say that there was 
much in my study that was positive and en-
couraging. There was not only enthusiasm 
for the emergence of a national system of 
regional networks but an impatience to get 
on with the business of solving the problem 
of linkage and of seeing the overall archi-
tecture in place. Indeed I found in college 
librarians across the country a great reser-
voir of energy, good sense, and practical 
experience. I was gratified to see an eager-

College Libraries I 25 

ness to employ that experience for the 
benefit of the coming generation of librar-
ians and "information scientists," as well as 
for patrons in the national community. 

No, they are not dead-not even sleep-
ing. But a disturbing number of college li-
brarians apparently have reason to feel they 
are being treated as if they were, not only 
by uninformed laypersons, but by their col-
leagues in the research library, in the state 
library, in the governor's conference, and 
on national commissions. 

How to respond to their anxieties, how to 
take advantage of their vitality, how to pro-
mote genuine involvement by college librar-
ians in grappling with national policy 
issues-these should be leading concerns of 
ACRL in the coming year, before the White 
House Conference, as well as beyond. 

REFERENCES 

1. Editor's note: A photograph of the author with 
the tombstone appears in American Libraries 
9:435 Guly-Aug. 1978). 

2. "Toward a Conceptual Foundation for a Na-
tional Information Policy," Wilson Library 
Bulletin 52:545-49 (March 1978). Also pub-
lished in Information Hotline 10:19--21 (May 
1978).