Full text of the entire speech is available . Today, throughout the world, libraries are contending with a variety of constraints upon their capacity to develop collections in an era where publications are expanding across an ever-widening landscape of subjects and forms. The price of books and particularly serials way beyond the rise in inflation. The future of serials is in the balance. Technology may result in the article displacing the journal as the unit of library currency.
New technology is expensive.
It requires a re-allocation of resources. The uncertain rate of technological development, implementation and user acceptance, and the very rapidity of technological change, often of an unexpected kind, with its hidden menace that tomorrow to-day's technology will become yesterday's hardware creates problems. So the National Library, like the State libraries and the university libraries must make difficult choices. For the National Library, these choices have been difficult. Despite funding limits which may become more severe, the Library is applying its resources to embrace technological change.