DOCUMENT ACCESS IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

Demand for documents in the United States has grown through use of computer searching so that now about 25 million documents are requested annually from off‐site sources. There is no central organisation for document access and collections are widely scattered, with little information on the location of particular items. There are also problems of restricted access to many organisations which have large collections of documents. Some improvements in document access are being made but progress is slow and there are many different views on how the problem should be met.