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Show LIBRARY SERVICES IN SUPPORT OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION The purpose of this study is to consider methods and means of providing adequate library and information services in support of the field of international education in the 1970's and beyond. It is based upon the thoughtful opinions of some fifty scholars, administrators, and library information specialists who served on the Task Force, on the larger Council of Advisors, or in positions of responsibility in five institutions, stretching from coast to coast, visited by the writer, that conduct or support programs in international education.* The report attempts to present an overview of the state of the art in respect to the libraries designed to serve these programs, the library . needs that remain unsatisfied, organizational and financial considerations, and recommendations concerning future action. Although this country emerged as a world power in the first two decades of this century, in-depth knowledge, of the societies and cultures that stretched beyond the geographical limits of North America and Western Europe, remained somewhat limited until the years immediately following World War II. Area studies did exist in a modest number of institutions before this time. For example, Russian studies were introduced in the 1890fs and a few Latin American programs were developed in the first quarter of this century, but these early efforts were the exception'rather than the rule. Area studies, enjoying as they did a rapid, in certain instances, a phenomenal growth in the 1950's and 60's, received a degree of financial support unprecedented in their brief history in the period of academic affluence that followed the launching of Sputnik in 1957. Comparable support did not always follow naturally for the libraries charged with serving these programs and yet they too shared in this remarkable advance. Now we are faced with a much tighter budgetary situation, further confounded by a severe inflation, and institutions are examining ever more seriously their purposes and objectives, their methods of fiscal management, and developing new lists of priorities in respect to programs. There are those involved with area studies who fear for the future of these programs which admittedly are, if offered at any level of sophistication, high cost operations because of the disciplinary, linguistic and technical sophistication required to sustain them. It is a proper question to ask why it is important for this country and its institutions to assign a reasonably high priority to the continued support of international education now and into the future when so many causes clamor for attention. This question is one to which the Government/Academic Committee on International Education has given its attention but it appears *Institutions visited: Columbia University, Library of Congress, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Berkeley. ' I ' -. . • . • |
