February 28, 1982

PRESIDENT REAGAN reached out to local governments last week, seeking support from the nation's governors and county leaders for his program of redefining responsibilities, or the ''New Federalism.'' The results, according to County Executive Alfred B. DelBello, were mixed. ''We endorsed the concept of re-allocating appropriate programs to local governments,'' Mr. DelBello said, after returning from Washington, ''but we attached five pages of conditions to our resolution - I hope he reads them.'' The President, for his part, pledged not to transfer responsibilities without appropriate resources.

QUESTION: What do ''The Hotel New Hampshire'' by John Irving, ''Forever'' by Judy Blume and ''Little Red Riding Hood'' have in common? Answer: They have all been targets for complaints in local libraries. Although there has been no discernible trickle-down effect from the Island Trees case, in which the School Board in Levittown banned nine books in 1976, Long Island's librarians recently filed a friendof-the-court brief opposing the board's action. The case has reached the United States Supreme Court, where opening arguments will be heard on Tuesday. Librarians on the Island have also geared up to handle any attempts at what they consider censorship in their libraries. ''Though we hate to admit it, I think the Moral Majority has had some influence,'' said Dr. Ralph Folcarelli, professor of graduate library science at the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University and chairman of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Suffolk County Library Association.

Poland's Roman Catholic episcopate called today for an end to martial law, freedom for those detained under its provisions and a national covenant in which Solidarity would partcipate. The call was issued after a two-day meeting in Warsaw of all the country's bishops. Although the episcopate has previously called for an end to martial law, as in a pastoral letter read in churches Jan. 24, the new statement was the strongest by the church since the military crackdown began Dec. 13. Western diplomats predicted that once it was disseminated among Poland's 18,000 parishes, the document could provide a focus for popular discontent with martial law.

If any fact can be said to underscore how quickly revolutions age, it is that half a century has passed since the day the Museum of Modern Art put a few photographs and models into its galleries under the title, ''International Exhibition of Modern Architecture.'' Behind that bland and unassuming label was one of the most determined efforts at design proslytizing this or any other museum has ever engaged in. For this exhibition was the celebrated ''International Style'' show, in which the museum presented the stark, white buildings of stucco and glass and metal by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and others that it wanted us to think would pull us out of the stultifying classicism of the 19th century and pave the way to a glorious new world. How old all of this now seems, and how far away from what has happened to architecture since. The freshness, the daring, the triumphant sense of newness that was the International Style's stock in trade is today neither fresh nor daring, and least of all is it new. If anything, the works of architecture that appeared in the exhibition by now seem quaint; the sense of revolution they represented comes across now not as powerful but more as prim, puritanical, and not a little innocent.

Since the age of the transistor dawned at Bell Laboratories in 1947, the United States has dominated what is now the $13 billion global semiconductor industry. In a business where prowess and profits have been measured by the ability to squeeze more and more electronic circuitry into less and less space, companies like Texas Instruments, Intel and Motorola have raced to outdo one another, sometimes trumpeting each new advance well before it was ready for market. The companies grew cocky and prosperous, innovation followed innovation, and shrinking electronic circuitry gave birth to everything from desktop computers to talking clocks. The industry is now developing yet another promising product that will appear on the market in a year or two. The product, known in industry parlance as the 256K dynamic RAM (for random access memory), is a silicon memory chip smaller than a postage stamp yet capable of storing all the words on a page of this newspaper.