(Dr. Billington's written statement, submitted to the subcommittee, follows:)
For fiscal 1994 we are requesting only those funds necessary to maintain core services and to address fundamental long-deferred infrastructure requirements. These funds enable us to make the contributions that only this Library can make to the Congress and the American people. The request totals $364.4 million, including authority to obligate $24.4 million in receipts, for a net of $340 million. It represents a total budget increase of $30 million, or 9 percent, over fiscal 1993. Of the $30 million, 71 percent (or $21.4 million) is required simply to fund mandatory pay and price level increases.
This proposed budget supports the Library's new seven-year strategic plan. Considering the nation's needs and the Library's strengths, the Library of Congress has developed a strategy for overcoming the backlog of uncataloged materials, strengthening current core services and improving in-house efficiency while preparing for the dissemination of the Library's key collections to the Congress and the nation electronically through new networks and joint ventures.
The Library of Congress Strategic Plan (1993-2000) that was submitted last month prepares the Library for its role of service to the Congress and the nation in the 21st century. The plan's first phase (1993-1996) gives top priority to the existing core library services by reducing arrearages and securing the collections while improving human resources management and financial management. These are the top budget priorities for fiscal year 1994.
We will not be able to maximize use of the Library's unique collections and staff to support the Congress, the nation's libraries and American education and economic performance if the basic infrastructure of the institution cannot be secured during the first phase of our strategic plan.
Cutting Back in 1993
In order to operate within the fiscal 1993 budget and make sure that every appropriated dollar is effectively spent, the Library is streamlining existing services and has initiated Library-wide review by the Inspector General to seek additional economies. Already this year, a cut of 128 authorized positions and the absorption of most mandatory pay and price level increases have resulted in significant cutbacks such as:
- Reducing reading room hours during low-use periods (including Sunday service during the summer months) and reducing or shifting some police services.
- Suspending selected publications (including the CRS Review and Major Legislation of the Congress and reducing by 50 percent the size of CRS InfoPacks and the quarterly Guide to CRS Products.
- Reducing by 32,000 the number of books, periodicals and other library materials purchased for the collections, and delaying the acquisition of nearly 300 CD-ROM products needed for research.
- Reducing the number of public tours and public telephone reference inquiries that we accommodate.
- Delaying the upgrading or replacement of outdated automated systems for the Library as a whole and of aging machines that provide free reading services for the blind and physically handicapped in particular.
- Eliminating educational outreach programs on major exhibitions such as presidential inaugurations and the Vatican Library.
Mandatory Cost Support Sought
The Library must increase its budget in fiscal 1994 to prevent further erosion of important services. Of the requested $30 million increase, $214 million, or 71 percent, is required simply to fund mandatory pay and price level increases. A new mandatory increase for locality pay will by itself require an estimated outlay of $5.2 million. The Library does not control these increased expenses. If additional funds are not appropriated to cover them, further reductions in service are inevitable.
Of the remaining $8.6 million requested, the largest single item is for collections security to maintain both higher levels of protection and the quality of service in a closed-stack environment. The next largest items address long-deferred needs to improve essential financial and human resources systems.
Overview of Library Services
The Library of Congress maintains a collection of nearly 100 million items--many of them irreplaceable--in more than 450 languages. This massive information resource serves the country in a variety of ways, including:
- Congressional Services - The Library provides impartial analytical research and information to the Congress on public policy issues--providing Congress with more that 645,000 products and research responses a year, including custom responses to 268,000 requests for research and information. The five areas of most intense research support during fiscal 1992 were health insurance; trade; defense policy; Soviet transformation and implications for the United States; and banks, thrift institutions and financial stability. The incomparable collections and multilingual staff of the Law Library and of other special collections are also specially accessible to the Congress.
- Cataloging Services - The Library supplies bibliographic records and related products to libraries and bibliographic utilities in all 50 states and territories--cataloging that would cost America's libraries in excess of $360 million annually if they had to do the work themselves.
- Research and Reference Services - The Library makes available to scholars and other researchers vast information resources, many of which are unique, covering almost all formats, subjects, and languages--serving every year more than 800,000 readers and responding to more that 1.4 million information requests a year. The Library also provides online access to its automated information files (containing more than 30 million records) to congressional offices, state libraries, and libraries which are cooperative cataloging partners throughout the nation. The Library also annually provides more than 36,000 books and other items to every state in the union via free interlibrary loans.
- Copyright Services - The Library's Copyright Office administers U.S. copyright laws and actively promotes international protection of intellectual property created by U.S. citizens, processing more than 650,000 claims for copyright registration and 400,000 requests for information annually.
- Blind and Physically Handicapped Services - The Library manages a free national reading program for 750,000 blind and physically handicapped persons, circulating more than 21 million items annually (disks, cassettes and braille) through 147 regional and subregional libraries and multistate centers.
- Other Library Services - In addition, the Library of Congress:
Promotes reading and literacy through the 26 state affiliates of the Library's Center for the Book.
Manages the nation's leading collection of folk music and folklore and promotes the preservation of folk culture throughout the U.S.
Coordinates and administers a cost-effective procurement program for nearly 1,300 other federal libraries.
Because it is such a unique storehouse of human knowledge, the Library is an increasingly important link for the Congress and the nation to foreign countries, providing at low cost substantial benefits to American libraries, universities, law schools and other institutions. The Library's international activities include:
- Purchasing materials through six overseas field offices for the Library of Congress and 86 other major American research libraries.
- Training scores of officials from developing and newly democratized countries in international copyright law and the protection of "intellectual property" as a basis for free markets.
- Bringing millions of foreign items to the Library for American researchers in science, technology and other fields.
Perhaps most important of all, the United States Congress, through its Library, has led the world in supporting the new parliaments of former communist countries. In the second year, programs of assistance to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were added to those we already provide to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and the former Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia).
The Congressional Research Service has coordinated the Library's substantial deliveries of equipment, library resources and technical assistance and encouraged other organizations to join in helping build these developing parliaments.
Six recent examples show how the Library makes a real difference to the nation and the world:
(1) The archivist of postcommunist Russia asked the Librarian of Congress to head an advisory group on opening up the archival records of the former U.S.S.R. and provided the Library with an unprecedented exhibit of heretofore top secret Soviet records;
(2) The Department of Defense used 500 copies of the Library's latest handbook on Somalia to orient unit leaders of the U.S. military task force now deployed there;
(3) The Library's preservation scientists analyzed the paper on which the original Indian Constitution was printed and advised the Indian government how to preserve this invaluable document;
(4) Our Cairo office advised the National Library of Kuwait on how to rebuild that devastated institution;
(5) The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped is leading a cooperative effort to establish an international standard for the production of audio books; and
(6) Department of State officials turned to the Library's audio preservation experts for advice about preserving Somalia radio broadcasts from 1950 to the present, which constitute that nation's only remaining record of its contemporary history.
Arrearages and Collections Services
Since I last appeared before you, the Library has made major progress in reducing its unprocessed arrearages. We have completed the second year of our three-year pilot program and are on schedule to meet our targeted reduction of 11.3 million unprocessed items by December of this year.
Success in 1993 depends, however, on the rapid filling of 140 authorized but vacant jobs--12 percent of the Library's antiarrearage work force. The vacancies exist because uncertainty over the Library's FY 1993 budget led to a Library-wide limited hiring freeze last April. Then, as that uncertainty ended, a federal court opinion in August required us to revise our hiring procedures and forced a de facto employment freeze. Further delay in hiring would put our arrearages timetable at risk. We hope to begin filling these critical vacancies soon. But if the budget outlook for fiscal 1994 does not appear likely to support these additional staff people, we may have to seek guidance from the committee on adjusting these arrearage targets.
During the past fiscal year, despite the personnel shortages, our people cut arrearages by 5.7 million, and during the first quarter of fiscal 1993 the arrearages were reduced by an additional 1.5 million items. The arrearages now stand at 32.1 million items, a drop of nearly 20 percent since our arrearage reduction program began.
We have made fully available to researchers and the Congress such impressive materials as: the U.S. News and World Report collection of 1.2 million photographic negatives from 1952 through 1986; the papers of Thurgood Marshall, Clare Booth Luce, Joseph Alsop, Reinhold Niebuhr and Byron White; the extensive records of the NAACP; the records of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the National Council of Jewish Women; more than 32,500 rare broadsides, leaflets and pamphlets on American history dating from 1527 through 1986; a 4,000 sheet series of topographic maps of Eastern Europe; our entire collection of Japanese children's literature; the papers of important musicians like Edward MacDowell, Artur Rubinstein and Henryk Szeryng; an 18,000 item African pamphlet collection; and substantial Arabic and Persian arrearages.
Much of the work on the latter collections was supported by newly raised private funds.
We are doing even more than the substantial numbers and our chart reveal. The Library is developing, testing and implementing new approaches to cataloging and arrearage reduction. These modernization efforts will not only help us meet the goals of our strategic plan (an 80 percent reduction of the backlog by the year 2000) but will also create models for libraries throughout the nation.
Major steps taken or planned include:
- Establishing whole book cataloging teams that process library materials more rapidly and encourage innovation and cooperation to improve productivity.
- Installing intelligent bibliographic workstations in place of "dumb" terminals to improve cataloger productivity.
- Working with OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), a bibliographic utility, to obtain records for more than 65,000 commercial sound recordings.
- Using collection-level cataloging to group materials sharing a common topical focus, instead of cataloging each item separately.
- Increasing the use of other libraries' cataloging to avoid duplication of effort and increase timeliness.
- Devising routine, high-speed techniques for processing the Copyright Deposits collection, the largest single collection in the Music Division.
- Processing 125,000 PREMARC records through use of the OCLC data base and sophisticated matching algorithms.
The fiscal 1994 budget requests additional funds to continue our crucial efforts to modernize Collections Services, including: $500,000 for updating the Library's incomplete PREMARC file with enhanced bibliographic records purchased from another source rather than continuing the old, expensive manual updating process; $500,000 for optical scanning of old serials records to permit access through a new automated serials management system; $350,000 to develop and implement the first phase of a plan to automate the Library's shelflist and to streamline shelflisting techniques; and $593,000 for acquiring machine-readable materials for the collections and for beginning a phased replacement program for items stolen or mutilated.
We are also requesting $1.1 million to purchase essential conservation supplies for collections processed in the arrearage reduction project, to enhance the preservation filming program and to accelerate the acquisition of microform versions of newsprint and other fragile materials. These preservation dollars will ensure that the Library's vast and often irreplaceable collections are stored in the proper manner and converted to the proper medium so that they will benefit future generations.
Collections Security and Constituent Services
In response to mounting evidence of thefts and mutilation, we took action to protect the collections by:
- Beginning the implementation of a comprehensive Plan for Enhancing Collections Security.
- Closing the book stacks to all persons except Library staff on official business and, by arrangement, members of Congress and their staffs.
- Installing theft detection gates at all building exits and beginning the installation of antitheft alarm devices in bound volumes.
- Accelerating the installation of caged enclosures for highest risk materials.
- Beginning the installation of video surveillance cameras.
For fiscal 1994, we seek funds to continue implementing the security plan, primarily to support book service activities in a closed-stack environment, place more antitheft alarm devices in high-risk volumes, establish a comprehensive reader registration program, and place video surveillance cameras in the remaining high-risk areas.
Our ability to sustain regular constituent services has been strained by these new security procedures, and we are requesting $1,296,000 and 45 positions to handle the new requirements while maintaining an acceptable level of reference and reader services. To support our program for protecting the collections, we are also requesting $197,000 and six positions for Collections Services; $116,000 and five positions for the Law Library; $261,000 for four vacant police positions and cloakroom services; $169,000 for security equipment; $10,000 for the Copyright Office; and $122,000 and four positions for the Congressional Research Service. All of these funds support our program to protect the collections.
We need an additional $534,000, including funding for the equivalent of 19 positions, to maintain reading room hours at the already reduced level of 68.5 hours per week. As we notified the Congress last year, we plan to reduce reading room hours during periods of low use beginning Jan. 29. With increased security measures, including closing the stacks, we have experienced a 31 percent increase in the number of items requested in the reading rooms. By reducing hours of service in seven of our 22 labor- intensive reading rooms on Tuesday and Friday evenings and closing on Sundays during the summer, we will be eliminating overtime and police costs and reallocating 27,000 hours of staff time to handle the increased workload.
But further cuts could curtail basic services and change the nature of the Library itself. The additional funding we request is needed if we are to honor our priorities of arrearage reduction, collections security and long-overdue improvement of human resources and financial management without drastically impairing the quality of our service.
Human Resources
One of the Library's chief goals and one of my personal goals--is to ensure a nondiscriminatory work environment for all employees. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia concluded in its Aug. 14, 1992, Memorandum of Opinion that the Library's system for competitively selecting employees for hiring or promotion opportunities during the period 1979 to 1988 was so subjective as to lend itself to discriminatory effects. We are accordingly revamping employment practices to ensure equity at all three stages of the competitive selection process: (1) the posted qualifications stage; (2) the panel stage; and (3) the interview stage.
We plan to reprogram fiscal 1993 funds to bring in temporary consultants in order to train our human resources personnel and selecting officials, conduct specialized analyses and install an applicant tracking system. For fiscal 1994, to sustain this advance, we are requesting $473,000 to fund nine new positions and $612,000 to fund 12 existing positions so that the Library can have its own specialists devoted to job analysis, monitoring the selection process at every step, doing disparate impact analyses and preparing employment data for reports, forecasting, and trends analysis.
Financial Management and Other Infrastructure Requirements
One of my first acts as Librarian of Congress was to ask that the General Accounting Office (GAO) provide a financial audit of the Library. As a result of this audit, GAO recommended that the Library implement an integrated financial management system. Since this audit was released in August 1991, we have completed detailed plans for implementing this GAO recommendation. We find the purchase and installation of a commercial software package to be the Library's least costly and most beneficial option. We continue to work with GAO in improving our financial management practices and have asked them to participate in the selection of a new system. We are asking for $1.7 million to purchase and implement a new system that will improve accountability to the Congress, support the appropriations process, enhance staff productivity, eliminate paperwork and minimize the need to rekey financial data. An integrated financial management system is essential for conducting the type of cost-benefit analyses that the Library needs to find new economies.
To operate and continue to rent an off-Capitol Hill collections storage facility, the Library requests $898,000 and 14 new positions to select, prepare and transport 250,000 volumes annually. We appreciate the Congress's support for acquiring critically needed collections storage space, and we are taking steps, in cooperation with the Architect of the Capitol, to use the $3,186,000 appropriated this year to rent and outfit a facility that will meet our short-term needs. We continue to believe (as stated in the plan we submitted to the Committee last year) that the acquisition of land and construction of buildings is the most economical long-term strategy.
The Library is committed to improving the workstations for staff members who spend at least 50 percent of their time at video display terminals (VDT), and the Library requests $522,000 to speed up the phased acquisition of appropriate ergonomic furni- ture and equipment. The additional funds will permit the completion of this project by 1996.
We continue to work with the Architect of the Capitol in making the Library's Special Facilities Center, located at Sixth and East Capitol streets, available for use. We now anticipate that the child care space will be available for use in June 1993. We are asking for $152,000 to equip this center, so that we can put in place another element of our strategy to improve access to the Library's vast holdings by permitting use of the center's short-term living quarters for visiting scholars as well as its training facilities for our staff and people using the collections.
Police Merger
The Senate Appropriations Committee, in its fiscal year 1993 Committee Report, directed the Library of Congress to initiate action to merge the Library of Congress Police function with the United States Capitol Police. Accordingly, we have been in consultation with the general counsels of the Capitol Police and the Architect of the Capitol and have submitted draft legislation to them for their review and comment. The draft legislation establishes the Library of Congress Division within the Capitol Police Force.
Library of Congress Bicentennial
The Library will mark its 200th anniversary in the year 2000. We propose a seven-year bicentennial project that coordinates a series of exhibitions, publications, conferences, public lectures, demonstration projects and other celebratory events promoting learning, literacy and access to the collections. A National Advisory Board, drawn from Congress and the public, will help with planning. We are asking for $225,000 as the appropriated annual base for this project, of which $206,500 can be reprogrammed from the Columbus Quincentenary project. Most costs of the Library bicentennial will be met by private funds.
Copyright
For the Copyright Office, we are requesting a total increase of $1,543,000, which is offset by our request to use $168,000 of increased receipts for a net increase of $1,375,000. More than 90 percent of this increase is for mandatory pay and price level increases.
Intellectual property continues to be one of the shining stars of our economy. Our computer software, books, music, motion pictures and television programs are popular all over the world and represent one of our country's critical trade and growth assets. These industries generated $38 billion in foreign sales in 1990, and they account for almost 6 percent of our gross national product. The Copyright Office helps to raise the level of copyright protection worldwide and fights to stamp out piracy of American music, motion pictures and software.
Through the effective use of technology and processing improvements, the Copyright Office is able to process a copyright registration claim in an average of four to six weeks. The new optical disk storage system -- approved by the committee -- will further improve the Copyright Office's ability to meet future service demands.
During 1993 the Copyright Office will implement the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, and we are requesting an increase of $37,400, which is fully funded by receipts, for additional nonpersonal costs associated with this new law.
Congressional Research Service
The additional $4.7 million requested in the Congressional Research Service (CRS) budget consists of $4.2 million for man- datory pay increases, $344,000 for price level changes and $121,746 for improving collections access and security, which is part of the Library's overall Plan for Enhancing Collections Security. Because 90 percent of the CRS budget goes for salaries and benefits, funding for the mandatories is particularly critical to maintain the capacity to meet Congress's analysis and information needs.
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Finally, we are asking for an increase of $3.5 million to continue the Library's free national reading program for the blind and physically handicapped. The increase does not represent any new programs. It permits continued service to over 750,000 people. It includes $1.8 million for machine replacement of the 30,000 cassette book machines and 25,000 talking book machines that we have identified as being worn beyond repair and in need of replacement over the next five years.
Conclusion
We have forged a strategy committed to making more accessible the vast resources assembled by the Congress during 193 years. Our purpose now is to support this dynamic democratic society in an age when new knowledge becomes a key to progress....
A crucial issue facing the Congress regarding its Library is whether to provide national electronic access to its tremendous assets or to relegate the institution to the status of a passive warehouse of materials accessible only to those who can journey to Washington.
The Library of Congress is in a special position to help the nation move ahead in the decades to come. First, it can enrich and foster the pursuit of truth by making our unmatched collections and knowledgeable staff more useful to Congress and the nation. Second, by exploiting new electronic technology, the Library can enormously increase the knowledge available to Americans in local schools, colleges, libraries and private sector research enterprises from Florida to Alaska. As a signal of our potential for increasing the direct delivery of materials to local users, we are proposing to make the Library's online catalog available without charge via the Internet, a national superhighway of many interconnected networks with a major backbone provided by the National Science Foundation's NSFNet.
We believe the future holds the potential for the Library to play a significant role in enriching and upgrading local institutions of learning and research, so that even those Americans far from great universities and the more affluent schools and libraries can still have access to the best of the nation's heritage and the latest in up-to-date information. Technology makes this possible; the Library's strategy envisions bringing an "electronic library" rapidly from concept into initial operation.
To put this strategy in motion, I have recently reorganized our top management and established a Library-wide working group on the electronic library of the future. The group is tasked with planning, preparing and pilot testing electronic delivery systems for the Library's role in the emerging national and international information networks. The Library is also determining the most appropriate relationships between the Library of Congress and other players in the electronic library arena as well as the production and distribution options for the Library's American Memory project.
A key element in this strategy is our request to expand the Library's services to the science and technology communities. One of the chronic problems in our national research and development establishment is the inadequate use of existing studies and inventions in public decision-making and technical work. People keep reinventing the wheel. This is an information problem, one that the Library of Congress can help to solve. We are proposing two distinct levels of activity to improve service: (1) placing a technical staff of five in our public reading rooms to instruct patrons in using automated resources for business and science and (2) making the latest information in this rapidly changing field easier to find and use by researchers everywhere, partly through the Library's development of a new Automated Referral Center for science and technical information.
The LC Fund Act
Finally, I will again seek sponsorship in the 103rd Congress of the Library of Congress Fund Act. This legislation is essential to the Library's future. It would enable the Library to extend the range of its services to meet new demands from Americans for specialized products and services which go beyond the Library's present and foreseeable tax-supported basic functions.
The act would allow the Library to provide customized services for researchers, law firms and others -- services which have been frequently requested of the Library but should not be supported by the taxpayer because they go beyond our basic tasks and provide extra services to specific customers.
We need a wider range of funding devices to meet the needs of the institution and of the people we serve -- the same range currently available to other major libraries in America.
We have greatly increased philanthropic giving to the Library as evidenced by a 72 percent increase in our trust funds since 1987 -- from $11.5 million to $19.8 million. But this act is essential if the Library is to realize more of its service potential for the nation -- and these new services will create new opportunities and activities for other libraries and economic enterprises.
The act creates a sustaining mechanism that the Library presently lacks: a revolving fund, through which the Library can recover the costs incurred in meeting specialized information needs of the business community and others. This responds to the General Accounting Office's recommendation to establish a revolving fund to handle fee-service activities. These new activities will not be undertaken at the expense of traditional free core services. Because it provides a rational way of making more of the Library's vast resources available to information seekers in government, academia and private industry, the Fund Act would enable the Library to serve a critical function in making America more competitive....
I hope that members of this committee will support passage of the Fund Act in this Congress as well as our budget request for fiscal 1994. Both lay the foundation for realizing the potential set forth in the Library's strategic plan....
