To maintain currency in the printed National Union Catalog (6):

Contribution to retirement_.

Group life insurance_

6. Office supplies

ANALYSIS OF INCREASES-Continued

The increased card business, larger book catalogs, and increased prices of containers used in shipping orders makes it necessary to request this increase of $26,000 in supplies. 7. New positions (40)-

To meet increases in workload resulting from increased sales of catalog cards and technical publications (30) :

30 GS-4-

Contribution to retirement.

Group life insurance..

Contribution to health insurance__

6 GS-6

Total_

+$26,000

+$226, 488

$149, 850 9, 740 499 1,500

$161, 589

$36, 822 2,393 123

Mr. STEED. Now if you would like to make some general comment on the items of increase we would be glad to hear you.

Dr. MUMFORD. I would say by way of general statement, Mr. Chairman, that this increased request is based primarily upon the greater volume. We talked earlier about the continued increase in the sale of catalog cards and in distribution of our publications. There are some other factors that enter into it, such as the pay increase of the Government Printing Office which will be reflected in our costs. On page 161 of our justifications, under item 5 this is estimated at $32,000. The next item, printing of catalog cards, results from the increasing business.

In general, for the 40 positions, this is attributed to increase in workload. As a result of the increase in volume of business also. I would be glad to have Mr. Welsh who has general responsibility for this operation elaborate upon it.

Mr. WELSH. Yes, sir.

The number of order slips we receive is one indicator that we use in determining our workload and our staff needs. So far this year we have received 409,000 more order slips than last year for a total of 12,478,000. That represents a total of eight additional days of work for our staff. I would like to refer to page 166, Mr. Chairman, which indicates what we expect to return to the Treasury this year and shows the num

ber of cards sold. Through the end of March we have sold 53 million cards, which is 8,500,000 more than the same period last year. The business continues to increase. All of the moneys appropriated for it are returned to the Treasury, plus an additional amount.

Mr. STEED. You show a drop in the return to the Treasury in relation to the cost. You were up to 124 percent in 1967. You are down to 113 percent in 1968. You estimate 110 percent in 1969. I assume that this results from the fact that you have had the pay increase and other costs added on.

Mr. WELSH. Yes, and additional staff.

ADJUSTMENT OF PRICES

Mr. STEED. Whereas your prices have remained the same. When you get into this sort of a downward trend, do you do anything about adjusting your prices?

Mr. WELSH. Yes, sir. We do review our prices.

We have not done so at this time because we are studying the impact of mechanization on the operation. It is possible we may be able to carry through this next fiscal year without requiring any increase in price as a result of the implementation of the mechanization program. We adjusted our prices in November 1965 to make sure we achieved the proper return to the Treasury.

Mr. STEED. You show on page 166 that your estimated obligations in 1969 will be $7,160,800 which, of course, is substantially less than the request for $7,338,000. What causes this difference?

Mr. ROSSITER. The difference is mostly the contingency fund.

Mr. WELSH. Yes. The $200,000 contingency fund, which we do not expect to need this fiscal year.

Mr. STEED. That is another word for a safety valve fund, as I understand it.

Mr. WELSH. Yes.

Mr. STEED. I think we will insert these statistics on pages 166 and 167 nto the record.

These cards and publications are sold to over 25,000 subscribers who depend them to construct their card catalogs and to obtain biliographical information. he number of libraries throughout the country utilizing this service has mushomed in recent years, primarily because of the growth in the number of college id school libraries. All of these libraries depend on the Library's card distriition service, and the general growth in American education is directly reflected

Mr. JAYSON. May I make two points? Specifically with regard to appropriation bills and oversight of appropriations, expenditures and the like, the Reorganization Act that we spoke about a little while ago has provisions which would impose some duty of that kind on the Comptroller General. His office would have an ADP setup, as I understand it, which would put into the machines materials or data such as you were talking about.

The other point I would like to make is that from the point of view of LRS and of any user for research purposes, one of the most useful things we could have would be to have an automated data bank or access to other data banks. By that I mean it is well known that many executive agencies have extremely useful materials-information. data, statistics-in computers within their own agencies, none of which is classified or even subject to a claim of executive privilege. For example, information concerning the census, unemployment, employment, educational programs, et cetera.

If the Congress itself had its own data bank, that is, had the tapes which are available to the various executive agencies or other research institutions which have put their information on tapes, if we had that material available to us, we could dip into it when needed and provide the information very quickly.

Many people have spoken about the usefulness of something like that.

Mr. STEED. One of the things that I have become impressed with in the hearings, we are constantly asking questions: "All right, here is the increase, what did you do last year? What was it the year before! What was left over?" We have quite a large sum in the pipeline and the Congress does not have a very handy way of knowing where its segments stand.

This is information that would be very useful now when we are in this agony of trying to make these very substantial budget cuts in the new obligational authority, the expenditures, and the recision of old appropriations. Presently, the only way this information can be attained is through the old-fashioned, cumbersome way.

I think that this whole area is something that we are going to bu to find some way to get into because just by sheer magnitude and volume, we are not going to be able to go on interminably being old fashioned because our work will overwhelm us.

Mr. JAYSON. Let me give you a little illustration of one small seg ment of its usefulness.

For a period of 6 weeks and on a pilot basis, we entered on a tape the titles, authors, and brief annotations of all LRS reports. I am not talking merely about these multilith reports, which represent only 1 small percentage of our total work, but all LRS reports. Then we took a printout from the computer as to what we had. What I am hand ing you here is this printout. It is divided into two parts covering a period of 6 weeks. The first part lists the LRS authors; the secti part arranges the reports by subject matter. This is a very small sar pling of our work. There you see listed all LRS reports for that & week period. We could pull out anything we have done on, for i

stance, foreign affairs, agriculture, or any breakdown that we may

have.

This is important not only from our immediate research point of view but from the point of view of a Member who wants to be kept currently aware of any information available to us in his own particular field. A man who is a specialist on the Commerce Committee may be interested in fisheries, for example, and may want to know the latest information about that subject or its related subjects. He could, through our printouts, instantaneously obtain information about any material that we have put into our tapes not only about LRS reports but also about pertinent articles from newspapers and magazines which our staff clips regularly, about Government publications, publications of other organizations, and so forth. Our people who do the clipping and filing also prepare a little notation of what each item is so that our own researchers will be alerted and kept current as to the latest events and writings in their fields. This, translated to a Member as user of our tapes, would give him the same currency, the same awareness of latest writings in his field of interest, and would do it very quickly.

I might also add, just to close the subject, that the technology is here, I am told, wherein we could have a terminal in a committee office or in each of the House and Senate buildings, or even in a Member's own office, which would be connected to our computer so that it could be queried in a very simple way, such as by putting the inquiry through a typewriter.

Mr. STEED. Thank you.

Off the record.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. STEED. We will turn now to page 122 of the Committee Print Distribution of Catalog Cards, Salaries and Expenses, and page 159 of the justifications.

The request is for $7,338,000, which, including the pending pay supplemental of $120,977, appears to reflect an increase over the cur rent year of $794,223. As I understand it, you plan to absorb all of the pay increases and not require a supplemental in 1968; is that correct Mr. ROSSITER. That is correct.

Dr. MUMFORD. For 1968, yes.

Mr. STEED. Then for the sake of the funds needed in 1969, you are really not talking about an increase of $794,000 but an increase of $915,000, in reality, are you not?

Mr. ROSSITER. That is right. You asked us to update these figures after we presented those.

Mr. STEED. All right. What enabled you to absorb this amount of pay raise?

Mr. ROSSITER. Several things. One, we were able to save money from the rent you gave us while we were waiting for additional sp to become available. Another, we deferred certain activities under automation program. We took advantage of the transferability a thority, taking money from some appropriations to cover the pay costs for others.

Mr. STEED. We will insert pages 159 through 163 of the justitia tions.

(The pages follow :)