ABSTRACT
Libraries are highly labour-intensive organizations, with salaries and wages constituting between 50 to 60 per cent of their expenditures. Because of a lack of increase in productivity of library staffs, the per-unit rate of rise of costs in academic libraries in the United States averaged six per cent per year in the two decades following 1950. With the development of computerized library networks having a large on-line, central catalogue servicing all libraries, there has been a significant introduction of economies of scale. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, libraries printed their catalogues in book form in multiple copies, although some French librarians had been promoting card catalogues since the Revolution. American mechanics were still making important contributions to the American System of manufacture in the mid-nineteenth century when American librarians were initiating the evolution of new library operations. A computerized library network embodies the half-dozen labour-saving principles enunciated that the classical, labour-intensive library cannot enjoy.
