Relationship of Local, State, and Federal Participation in Public Library Development

important forward step in library development. In signing the bill passed by the 84th Congress, President Eisenhower noted that the federal program it established represents an effort to stimulate the states and local communities to increase library services, particularly library services available to rural Americans. The legislation, thus based on the concept of complementary local, state, and federal re-sponsibility, is the product of long evolution in the library field. The provisions of the Library Services Act and the experience under it to date provide a starting point for a brief consideration of cooperation which has developed among levels of government in the public li-brary field. The general term, "intergovernmental relations, " it has been pointed out, was not found in the vocabulary of American political science until the twentieth century. Earlier discussion of intergovernmental affairs was chiefly in terms of constitutions and statutes and narrow analyses of specific rights and privileges of the various levels. Only within the last generation has there been any extended examination of intergovernmental relationships with reference to broad matters of public policy, economics, financial responsibility, and administration.1 The library field is no exception; not until comparatively recently have both state-local and federal-state relations been identified as major considerations in library development. In April 1953, Paul Howard, writing in Library Trends, identified a series of activities which indi-cated an acceleration of federal and state interest in library extension, but concluded, "It is generally accepted as a historical fact that public library development in the United States has been, up to now, pre-dominantly local.&quot