| This study examines the historical case of the National Library of Education (NLE), one of three national subject libraries in the United States. The 1994 "Goals 2000, Educate America Act" founded the NLE from the library of the U.S. Department of Education, nominally making it a peer of the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library. The study seeks to determine whether the NLE's lack of appropriated funding from Congress in the years since, along with its apparent functioning at a lower level than its sibling national libraries, may be traced to a lack of stakeholder involvement. Adapting traditional constituencies from national library literature to the policy method of stakeholder analysis, the study designs a model around three broad groups of potential NLE stakeholders---politicians, professionals, and the public. Relying on theories of new agency viability and reciprocity among stakeholders, the study models data from interviews in those groups.; Documentary evidence, interviews, and observational data are evaluated through three study questions. The first, which asks what the long-term history of the federal education library reveals about its ability to attract stakeholders, finds few strong supporters of the collection outside the agency throughout its history. The second, which asks what role potential stakeholders played in the NLE's establishment, finds it was nationalized due to the efforts of one politician, Congressman Major Owens of New York. Lack of broad-based support also characterizes the data collected for the third question, which covers the NLE's performance since nationalization.; Potential support relationships among the groups modeled could have circulated resources through the reciprocal stakeholder model, renewing the NLE and making it viable. Absent leadership capable of building new support through creative effort, an agency without stakeholders present at its establishment is disadvantaged in the race to demonstrate its value and earn new funding. |
