A large amount of data were gathered and analyzed for this study. In organizing their collections of official publications the majority of depositories provide a mixed arrangement, some materials are shelved with the main collection, some are housed in separate areas. Depositories employ a wide range of shelf arrangements for their documents. An attempt w as made to discover how many personal computers are available for public use in the depositories compared to the number reserved for staff. This was a difficult question to answer.
Results show a wide variability among respondents.
The typical library provides seven PCs for exclusive staff use and six for use by library patrons. More significantly, t he typical library has .4 public service PCs per 1000 people served. Academic libraries have more, with 2 PCs per 1000 population, government libraries have 1.7 and public libraries have only .15 PCs for every 1000 people they are mandated to serve. The se figures do not show how many PCs are needed per 1000 people served but it is reasonable to predict that at this rate public libraries at least, will not be adequately equipped to accommodate patrons who will wish to access an increasing amount o f electronically available government information. On the positive side findings show that the majority of computers available for public access in the depositories are equipped with 486 and Pentium CPUs which are ideal for Internet access.