Community Use of Academic Libraries

non-Yale community. The library is rapidly finding itself in the posi-tion of the man who is supporting two families with the wages from a job barely sufficient for one. The statistics for this past year detail the rising number of non-Yale users, within the Yale Libraries as well as through interlibrary resource sharing. The Library has ac-tively cooperated in the library affairs of the State.... Demands from the outside continue, encouraged by the University’s open-door policy. Our desire is to cooperate to the fullest extent possible, but our means are already overextended. In concert with the Library, the University must define the role of the Yale University Library in both New Haven and the States1 The foregoing description of a great university library’s involvement in sharing campus library resources with a growing non-campus clientele can be multiplied a hundredfold by college and university librarians all over America. There is considerable evidence that under-graduate students, and especially those from colleges whose libraries are woefully inadequate, are seeking library materials wherever they can find them. The public librarians on Long Island report that college students will drive thirty miles or more and raid public library collec-tions for materials to support their studies. Shank, in his survey of access to scientific and technical information in the metropilitan New York City area, supports this view by indicat-ing that “individual users, particularly undergraduate students, wander far throughout the region to use library resources. Quite apparently their use is dictated largely by convenience of location of library fa-cilities to their homes and jobs. The more difEicult the problem and the more serious the need, the more the users turns to the majo