Volume 16, Number 1
Feb 1992

Letter

To the Editor:

Thanks very much for sending a copy of your December issue and for the notice of the Commission Report. It was a fascinating assignment and the result seems to be helpful.

I could seldom speak for the whole Committee, but there is one point in your notice I would like to clarify. We did not contrast "great collections" to "books that were most used." Our focus was rather on "use-driven selection," which we understood to mean any use rather than most use. (My personal feeling is that in general heavily-used books do get attention already.) Our main interest was in distinguishing the needs of a national program from the occasional needs of an individual library for repair or replacement of an individual book in that library, and to assure that federal funds were used appropriately. We all felt that use-based selection would not do that.