Today, we have often heard that information is a national resources, perhaps our most important national resources, and that government should recognize this and develop a national policy for the effective management and use of information. But traditionally the library has played a rather passive role in selecting, acquiring, preserving and transfering information. Now we have faced greater and much more diverse and more urgent demand from users and we have to cope effectively with a massive increase in volume and in cost in selecting, acquiring, storing and retrieving information. Individual libraries can no longer keep pace with the published outputs of the world. The solution of these problems lies in "national planning and in cooperation through inter-library cooperation and in the application of data processing to library operations." Also at the national level lies the responsibility for total bibliographic control of the national information output and for the interfacing of this with other national and international systems; for the development, adoption and maintenance of, standards in all areas affecting library work; for the provision of services based on centrally created and maintained bibliographic data files, and for planning and policy development of the national information system.