Library management in the tight budget seventies. Problems, challenges, and opportunities

This paper examines changes in the management of university, special, and medical libraries brought about by the budget curtailments that followed the more affluent funding period of the mid-1960s. Based on a study conducted for the National Science Foundation by the Indiana University Graduate Library School, this paper deals with misconceptions that have arisen in the relationship between publishers and librarians, and differentiates between the priority perceptions of academic and of special librarians in the allocation of progressively scarcer resources. It concludes that libraries must make strong efforts to reduce the growing erosion of materials acquisitions budgets because of growing labor costs as a percentage of all library expenditures; that they must make a working reality of the resource-sharing mechanisms established through consortia and networks; and that they must use advanced evaluative techniques in the determination of which services and programs to implement, expand, and retain, and which to curtail and abandon.