INTRODUCTION

The Annual Meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies affords an opportunity for scholars and teachers of the humanities and social sciences in the 51 disciplines and sub-disciplines represented by the Council’s constituent societies to engage in formal and informal conversation on topics of broad common interest. The principal formal session of the 1990 Annual Meeting was a panel discussion on the subject of  “Scholars and Research Libraries in the 21st Century.”

The Council invited five speakers to reflect upon the relationship between scholars and their most essential intellectual resource: the research library. Speakers were invited to conceive the topic broadly and to approach it from whatever perspective seemed most appropriate to them. The stimulating panel that the Council was able to assemble included Patricia Battin, President of the Commission on Preservation and Access; Billy E. Frye, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Emory University; D. Kaye Gapen, Dean of the General Library System at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Richard A. Lanham, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles; and A. Richard Turner, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University and Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. The presentations were both thoughtful and provocative. They prompted equally challenging questions and responses from the audience.

This panel discussion was part of a larger effort that ACLS has been making to address the general problem of scholarly resources over the last several years. It followed upon the completion of the work of the Research Library Committee, established by the Council on Library Resources and co-sponsored by ACLS, the Association of American Universities, and the Social Science Research Council. That Committee, which included university presidents, senior academic officers, faculty members, librarians, and archivists, met five times during 1988 and 1989 in an effort to explore the future form and substance of the academic research library. The Committee placed particular emphasis on the needs and expectations of faculty members in the humanities and social sciences. The “Statement from the Research Library Committee,” which was distributed to those attending the ACLS Annual Meeting and later published by the Council on Library Resources, is included here along with the presentations of the five speakers.