A sampling of invoices paid in the current fiscal year for serials and periodicals, the life blood of any effective research library, provides the following examples of recent price increases:

Mr. STEED. The first item of increase in this appropriation is identified as $118,000 for increased costs of acquisitions. If I understand the statement correctly, you are saying that this increase is to restore the buying power of the book dollar to what it was in fiscal 1967. You say this was the last year in which an increase in this appropriation was requested?

Dr. MUMFORD. Yes, sir; that is correct.

Mr. STEED. Was that request granted?

Mr. WELSH. No, sir; not completely. We requested $70,000 and we got $20,000. There is a misstatement in our Justification Book on page 175 which indicated that we got $70,000.

Mr. STEED. Then what was the result? Since books cost more than they did, you were just able to buy fewer books; is that it?

Mr. WELSH. Yes, sir. I have some examples. Fortune Magazine. The 1967 price was $8 and 1968 price is $14, a 75 percent increase. Soviet Geography, 1967 price, $6 and 1968 price, $10, an increase of 66 percent. Scientific American, 1967 price was $6, and 1968 price, $11.80, a 96.6 percent increase.

Mr. STEED. These are some of the very largest increases but you say that there is a 20 percent increase.

Mr. WELSH. Yes, sir..

Mr. STEED. It averages out to that?

Mr. WELSH. Yes. The average increases are reflected on page 176 of the justifications, where we show the increase from fiscal 1965 to the first half of fiscal 1968. The increase for books from fiscal 1967 through the first half of fiscal 1968 is 10 percent for that six-month period, from $4.07 to $4.48.

Mr. STEED. This pressure of costs you have been under which has reduced the total number of acquisitions you have been able to make, has that created any serious omission from your materials?

Dr. MUMFORD. It has certainly meant that there were things we should have acquired but we were not able to do so.

Mr. STEED. Do you feel like you have had to forego acquisitions that there has been any substantial demand for?

Dr. MUMFORD. Perhaps Mr. Welsh can speak to that. It is very important that we acquire the important publications as they are issued, even if there is no immediate call for them, because this material will remain important and in years to come it will be much more difficult to acquire and more expensive, more so than it is to acquire it currently.

ACQUISITION GAP IN AFRICA AND FAR EAST COLLECTIONS

Mr. STEED. You make reference to a gap in acquisitions in your collections of Africa and the Far East, and you ask an increase of $42,000 to close this gap. Could you give us some comment on that?

Dr. MUMFORD. Despite our best efforts to learn of the important publications being issued, some are not announced to the extent that we learn about them promptly. When we do learn about them they may no longer be available. As a result, gaps do occur in our collec tions as time goes on. In some years past, when the Library had even less adequate funds for the purchase of material, such gaps occurred. Now these gaps represent important materials for which there is a need and a demand. In recent years we have been able to do very little in filling the demand from the current appropriation because most of it was required for current materials. We are asking for this second item to purchase selected retrospective materials, as we call them, that is, materials over 2 years old, that are needed and are important.

BOOKS FOR THE LEGISLATIVE REFERENCE SERVICE

Mr. STEED. Will you make some comment about this item of $15,000 for books for the Legislative Reference Service? What is the nature of this type of material?

Dr. MUMFORD. Because of the heavy demand for current books by Members wishing to borrow, or Government agencies or individuals using them in the reading rooms, sometimes the staff of the Legislative Reference Service is delayed in proceeding with a report because it cannot get a particular book, the book is not on the shelf. Additional copies of a small, selected number of very important books are purchased for the reference collection in the Legislative Reference Service. Now, there is no intention of building up a second large library collection, but it does facilitate the work of the research people in LRS. Mr. Jayson could elaborate.

Mr. JAYSON. The problems that Congress is involved in, and therefore we are involved in, are the ones before the public, so there is a competing need for the books on these subjects.

CARRYOVER FUND

Mr. STEED. This appropriation is made to remain available until expended. On page 126 of the committee print you show that you brought forward into the current year about $24,000 unused from earlier appropriations. You do not show any anticipated carryover from the 1968 funds into 1969. Does this indicate that you either have or expect to obligate the entire amount available to you or will there be any carryover July 1, as you see it now?

Mr. ROSSITER. This indicates there will be hardly any carryover at all.

Mr. STEED. We will turn now to page 181 of the justifications and page 127 of the committee print and take up the item; "Books for the Law Library." The request for this year is $125,000, the same as it has been for the last 3 years. How much have you obligated or expended up to some recent date in this year and what is the outlook as to what balance you may or may not have on June 30?

Mr. COFFIN. During the fiscal year 1968 we spent actually in excess of $129,000, which means that we went into our carryover of the year before. For this amount we acquired 52,976 pieces of material in the law field.

Mr. STEED. You anticipate no balance at the end of the year?

Mr. COFFIN. We can't tell how much of a balance may be carried over because, as you know, money obligated may have to be disencumbered at the end of the year because some of these services which we have ordered may not come in. But we do not anticipate there will be much of a carryover, if any.

Mr. STEED. What part of this item would you classify as being used for repeat items or continuation items, as against the complete volume? Mr. COFFIN. For periodical subscriptions, in 1968 we allotted $47,000 of the newly appropriated money; for microfilm subscriptions we llotted $250; and for subscriptions to special series of publications, 35,000. So you see, sir, that we use approximately $52,000-plus.

Mr. STEED. Since you asked for no increase and since I assume that he materials you acquire have this same impact, that is, the impact of increased prices which you encounter in other sections, how do you nanage this without having to ask for additional money?

Mr. WELSH. We picked up some temporaries but not from the contingency fund. We carried forward some we had the previous year.

COMPLETION OF THE COMPUTER PROGRAM

Mr. STEED. What about the date of expectation as to when the cor puter program would be ready?

Mr. WELSH. There are a number of factors. We are not absolutely certain, but we hope it will be in the early fall.

Mr. STEED. Do you believe that you will have it fully operative during this coming fiscal year?

Mr. WELSH. We certainly hope so. There will be a period when we will be testing this new equipment to make certain we have all the bugs removed from it and during that time we will continue to use the manual operation.

Mr. STEED. Mr. Andrews?

Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. Do you think this computer you have purchased is going to be broad enough to do full-scale work! In other words, can someone contact you and get instant retrieval? Mr. WELSH. No, sir. This is a computer dedicated to this particular operation, just in the card distribution operation. It is limited.

Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. Maybe I was unclear in my question My point was that in an operation of the size you have, the many different facets, you cannot use a common computer to cover all of your problems, you have to have specific small ones?

Mr. WELSH. That is true. There is a much larger computer installa tion in the Library, an IBM 360–30 that is used for fiscal and other operations.

Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. But you find it more economical to maintain these two computers rather than one large one?

Mr. WELSH. Yes, sir. This is a computer not in the sense of an all-purpose computer but one that is dedicated to operating certain pieces of equipment in conjunction with optical scanning, sorting and tape routines. It is a special-purpose computer as distinguished from general-purpose computer.

Mr. STEED. They have to have these card catalogs printed up in quar tities at the Government Printing Office and put them in their stock bins, and they always have the problem of ordering too many or not enough, not knowing what the libraries will be ordering throughor the country. In this way, they put the material on the tape and it is there permanently, and if they need a thousand of them they can r them off, if they only need 10 of them they can run them off. They ge away from using all this space for filing boxes for these cards. Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. It is an inventory control machine, in other words, more than anything else, where you get out only what you need?

Mr. STEED. Not only that, but I understand it actually produces the card itself.

Mr. WELCH. Yes. It will store the image and print out the card Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. I was in a hearing at Independe Offices a year or 2 ago on this computer business. They said genera that in Government we underutilize the memory bank, the computer capacity to remember things. I was wondering whether in this cat you could not use the large computer as the storage bank for the

formation, with the printout, mechanical process, and all the rest over where you are now.

Mr. WELSH. This is a different aspect of storage than we usually think of. The cards will be sequentially arranged in a magazine or drum and the card images will be retrieved as needed. The computer, we think, will be in full operation at all times.

Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. There is no possibility of commonality between the memory bank of this computer and your big computer?

Mr. REIMERS. Not in the memory bank itself, but possibly in the directing part of the computer, the main frame, the central processing unit. This may be shared with some other functions. Now, the fact that this catalog card computer operation is physically located at the Navy Yard while the Library's main computer is in the Library of Congress' Annex Building would create some difficulties. We could operate this way, but we would have to have a very broad-band communications system which would probably negate any savings we would make by trying to utilize the main computer.

Mr. ANDREWS of North Dakota. In other words, the communications setup would tie up so many telephone lines between your memory bank and this location that it would cost as much as or more than maintaining a separate memory bank at the Navy Yard?

Mr. REIMERS. We probably would not be able to operate over telephone lines. It would more likely have to be by coaxial cable. Mr. ANDREWs of North Dakota. Thank you.