THE NATIONAL INFORMATION RESOURCE

In Britain, university libraries encountered a decline in funding later than in the US, but had never enjoyed support sufficient to permit ambitious acquisitions schemes designed to extend the national information resource which together academic library collections constitute. Hitherto new technology, so far from reducing the output of literature in conventional formats, has merely enlarged the number of the claimants for limited funds: snared cataloguing networks, while offering economies, threaten to erode the position of the scholar‐cataloguer, so posing a threat to parity with academic staff. Never, Ratcliffe argues, has the need been greater for the combined expertise of library staff and faculty in collection‐building for the future.