E.

This increase is necessary to provide for a 3.7 percent pay increase effective January 1993.

The Library's reimbursement to the Bureau of Employee's Compensation for benefits and other payments for fiscal 1991 is more than the amount budgeted for those purposes as follows:

The Purchase of Books program provides for the acquisition of materials in the Library's general collections and in the Law Library collections. The program is administered by the Office of The Associate Librarian for Collections Services in conjunction with the Collections Policy Office and the Law Library. Materials purchased by the Library include essential commercial publications and others which are not available through copyright deposit, transfer from other federal agencies, gift, domestic and international exchange, or by provisions of state and federal law. The majority of these materials are foreign. overseas offices and arrangements with book dealers, agents, and publishers to ensure efficient and prompt acquisition of current foreign publications of research value on a world-wide basis.

The Library maintains

In light of the Library's commitment to improve its acquisition of library materials, the Purchase of Books Program will require $8,204,000 in fiscal 1993 to sustain purchasing power for books and other materials for the general collections and for the Law Library collections. This represents a price level increase of $385,000 over fiscal 1992. An additional $150,000 is required to support the Library's growing need for computer files (e.g., CD-Rom, optical disc, etc.). This includes $50,000 for law materials in machine-readable form and $100,000 for computerized files to support the Library's science and technology initiative. Collections Services is requesting a total increase of $535,000 for fiscal 1993. For fiscal 1994 and fiscal 1995, the Library plans to request increases of $200,000 for each year for purchase of materials to support further the science and technology initiative. (See also Constituent Services portion of the Library's fiscal 1993 budget request.)

Therefore,

Collections Services is requesting an increase of $385,000 to sustain purchasing power for books and other library materials for the general collections and for the collections of the Law Library. During the past year, the Library benefitted from a strong dollar and moderate rates of inflation in the world's largest publishing countries, that is, Western Europe and Japan. Recognizing that these factors can fluctuate unpredictably from year to year, the Library conducted a study of the average price paid for all forms of materials from fiscal 1985 through fiscal 1990 and projected the average price from fiscal 1991 through fiscal 1993. Based on the results of this study, an increase of 5% over fiscal 1992 prices is projected for the general collections in fiscal 1993. Legal materials are also projected to increase by 5%. Therefore, Collections Services requests an increase of $334,000 for the general collections and $51,000 for law materials for fiscal 1993.

A growing workload factor, stimulated by the requirement to better serve the public with reference materials in machine-readable form, necessitates an increase of $100,000 for the general collections (to purchase science and technology materials) and $50,000 for the Law Library. Additional funding for computer files in various formats (e.g., CD-Rom, optical disc, various computer software programs for informational and instructional purposes, etc.) is required to support requests for information either uniquely available through such media, or greatly enhanced through special computer