This continued on Tuesday morning, and was followed by visits to important local libraries. This project has not gone very far yet, but there are still hopes that it will proceed. There is a need for a national information strategy, including art libraries and museum libraries. Slow Waltz on the Information Highway. The paper reported on a recently completed survey of museum libraries in the United States.
Libraries tend to be poorly funded relative to the budget of the parent organization.
An analysis of responses from museum directors indicated that administrators report more library use than the librarians perceive. It was clear from Dr. Bierbaum's paper that museum libraries in the United States have a lot of work to do if they are to become recognised as an important focus of information resources and services within their institutions, and to obtain the financial resources they need to perform this role effectively. For the second part of the Tuesday morning meeting we split into two groups, one to visit the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the other to visit the Library of Congress. Valerie Wheat and her colleagues took the first group to the Museum Reference Centre, where they were able to see the collections developed to meet the wide-ranging needs of the professional staff of the Smithsonian Institution. At the Library of Congress, Helena Zinkham and colleagues showed us the Prints and Photographs Division, including how they store and handle a wide variety of different forms of material, and their work to develop a system to display images linked to the Library of Congress public access computer catalogue.