Librarians Are 'Knowledge Navigators'
Remarks of Librarian of Congress James H. Billington at the FLICC Forum
By JAMES H. BILLINGTON
Welcome to the 21st annual FLICC Forum on Federal Information Policies. Already this morning we have celebrated the outstanding organizations and individuals in our field. Now we turn our attention to encouraging and supporting the current and next generations of librarians who will lead our profession and our nation forward in this information age.
Today technology is delivering the knowledge of mankind to our computer desktops, and the "digital divide" is closing. The driving force behind these trends is libraries. The caretakers of this vast and ever-growing information universe are librarians.
While the Web itself spirals outward, as knowledge management evolves into the keystone for educational, social and commercial growth, and e-government and e-commerce become the watchwords for business and government, librarians are the "knowledge navigators" necessary to traverse this new electronic world.
Today we will first seek to identify what new competencies professional information managers need to adapt to this swift pace of technological change and then take a closer look at some of the expanding e-government programs in the federal sector and developing trends in electronic content that federal information professionals are addressing.
President Bush and the Congress have already responded to the nation's need for information professionals by supporting an ambitious program that focuses on recruiting and training the next generation of librarians through the "Recruiting and Educating Librarians for the 21st Century Act." This national initiative acknowledges that the profession is critical for the nation to maintain its leadership role in the world and succeed in the global marketplace.
How will this growing understanding of the changing role of librarianship outside the federal government inform the actions of key decision-makers within the government?
The Library of Congress has long taken the initiative to respond to the challenges of both the evolving role of the federal librarian and the needs of e-government. We began by making digital legislative information freely available online with the introduction of THOMAS in January 1995, and by developing the National Digital Library and the American Memory projects. These gateways to rich primary source materials offer more than 8.5 million digital items in 100 historical collections. Last year the Library's Web site handled approximately 3 billion transactions.
We were also creating the necessary structure to support these initiatives long before knowledge management or e-government were topics of discussion. With the support of the Congress, the Library has also led, with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, a national collaborative effort to create a national infrastructure to preserve digital content, build a resilient network of digital preservation partnerships, and develop the digital preservation architecture to support and enable these goals.
Now that the president and Congress have charged the federal community with developing both the professional expertise and the infrastructure needed to support these bold initiatives, it is the federal librarian who can determine how best to syndicate the nation's data and develop sustainable processes to ensure both its access and protection no matter where the future takes us.