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Standards for public libraries have undergone dramatic changes in the last deCade. Traditional standards measured only "inputs, " or what the community put into the library in terms of staff, books, funding, etc. However, these standards did not measure the services that the library produced, and, as a result, the Public Libraries Association (PLA) developed a series of publications that established a national standard for the planning processes and output measures for public libraries. In the mid-1980s the Public Library Development Program (PLDP) further developed these concepts and introduced two new concepts: library roles and nationally collected public library statistics. Although state standards for public libraries are more diverse than national standards as a result of each state's own unique context and their responses to national guidelines, newly developing national and state standards offer exciting potential. (MAB) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document