The STRUCTURE OF NATIONAL DOCUMENTATION AND LIBRARY SERVICES

Abstract

Your Conference Committee asked me to talk about national documentation systems and to be provocative. Thus any dogmatism should not be taken too seriously. I would like to start by taking stock of the problem in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the end of the last war we, as documentalists, have lived in a climate of crisis, of alarums and excursions. The cause has been commonly ascribed to the so‐called ‘flood of information’, the ‘literature explosion’. Perhaps the real revolution lies elsewhere, in the deep‐seated change in our publication potential.