The article deals with the history of federal legislation in the United States, with an emphasis on the Library Services Act (LSA) and its successor, the Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA).
The American Library Association (ALA) began to claim federal support in the 1920's, and after twists and turns the Congress passed LSA in 1956. Federal library administration expanded since then. Throughout this process ALA has taken an active and important role with the aid of its Washington D.C.office and its Committee on Legislation. ALA has gradually been developed to be a big agency which supports federal library administration. Federal legislation, in the meantime, established state library agencies which helped, as administrative organizations, to strengthen legal relationship between the national government and the states. Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960's American librarians welcomed their ‘golden age of library legislation'. LSCA expanded library services, especially to the disadvantaged people; other federal laws, e.g. National Defence Education Act of 1958, Higher Education Act of 1965, and Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, facilitated library development. From the Nixon administration on the federal financial situation has been worsening, and these library laws have failed to function as they should. American librarians tody are undergoing hard times, but this in terms of library legislation, may lead to the beginning of a new era in the United States.

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An expert system is one of the major applications of artificial intelligence. Several expert systems have been put into practical use, especially in medicine. The author built a system for the identification of the places of publication of European printed books before 1800, using MECS-AI (Medical Education and Consultation System by means of Artificial lntelligence), a general purpose tool for the medical expert system developed by the University of Tokyo Hospital.
ln this system, the knowledge about the localization consists of several compositorial features (signatures, catchwords, etc.), and is represented as production rules (IF ... THEN …) divided into knowledge source subgroups which are provoked only when they become necessary. The uncertainty associated with a rule is given by a certainty factor (CF: numric judgement of plausibility), and the CFs of the rules are combined, in an inference process, to support or to reject the conclusion parts of the rules.
Although it is difficult to judge the utility and efficiency of the system over a short term, the system seems practical and promising. lt is believed that expert systems for other bibliographical studies can be useful tools for research and education not only in bibliography but in related fields.

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Cecil R. Roseberry describes in his “History of the New York State Library” that the first of the traveling libraries containing 100 volumes of books chosen out of the New York State Library's holdings was sent out on February 8, 1893 to a hamlet of Charlton, Saratoga County. Melvil Dewey, the Director of the New York State Library, refrained from talking about the traveling libraries for seven years after they were launched. At last, in 1901 a tract on “Traveling Libraries” was published by the Education Department at Albany.
Tomosaburo Sano, designated as the Director of the Akita Library in April 1900, contributed an article on “the beginning and developments of traveling libraries in the United States of America” to No. 115 (February 1902) of the Journal of the Akita Education Association. It is supposed that Sano acquired the Annual Reports of the Regents of the University of the State of New York and the bulletin “Traveling Libraries” written by Melvil Dewey. Sano inaugurated the traveling libraries from October 1902 in Akita Prefecture, which was the first attempt in Japan.

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