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History 1943 - present

1943

The Library commemorated the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth. In opening the Library's exhibit, an annotated catalog of the books in Jefferson's personal library by bibliographer E. Millicent Sowerby was undertaken (it was published in five volumes, 1952-59), and the Library started microfilming its collection of Jefferson papers in the same year.

1944

Librarian MacLeish resigns.

1945

President Harry Truman named assistant librarian Luther H. Evans, a political scientist, as Librarian. Evans served until 1953.

A new Library of Congress commitment to international library and cultural cooperation was one of Evans's major contributions. The Library of Congress Mission in Europe, organized by Evans and director of acquisitions Verner W. Clapp in 1945, acquired European publications for the Library and for other American libraries. The Library soon initiated automatic book purchase agreements with foreign dealers around the world and greatly expanded its agreements for the international exchange of official publications. It organized a reference library in San Francisco in 1945 to assist the participants in the meeting that established the United Nations.

1954

Evans's successor as Librarian of Congress was L. Quincy Mumford, who was director of the Cleveland Public Library when he was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mumford, who in 1957 initiated the planning that led to the construction of the Madison Building, guided the Library through its most intensive period of national and international expansion. In the 1960s the Library of Congress benefited from increased federal funding for education, libraries, and research. Most dramatic was the growth of the foreign acquisitions program, an expansion based on Evans's achievements a decade earlier. In 1958 the Library was authorized by Congress to acquire books by using U.S.-owned foreign currency under the terms of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954 (Public Law 480). The first appropriation for this purpose was made in 1961, enabling the Library to establish acquisitions centers in New Delhi and Cairo to purchase publications and distribute them to research libraries throughout the United States.

1965

President Lyndon B. Johnson approved a Higher Education Act which, through Title IIC, had great significance for the Library of Congress for the ambitious purposes of acquiring, insofar as possible, all current library materials of value to scholarship published throughout the world, and providing cataloging information for these materials promptly after they had been received. The new effort christened the National Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging (NPAC). The first NPAC office opened in London in 1966. In the past decade, the Library's overseas operations have been consolidated. Today, the Library has six overseas offices and cooperative acquisitions arrangements with booksellers and libraries around the world.

Shared acquisitions and cataloging made international bibliographic standards imperative. The crucial development took place at the Library of Congress in the mid-1960s; the creation of the Library of Congress MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) format for communicating bibliographic data in machine-readable form. This new capability for converting, maintaining, and distributing bibliographic information soon became the standard format for sharing data about books and other research materials. The possibility of worldwide application was immediately recognized, and the MARC format structure became an official national standard in 1971 and an international standard in 1973.

1967

The preservation and conservation of library collections has become an important concern of research libraries in the past few decades. The Library of Congress inaugurated a pilot project to study techniques for the preservation of deteriorating or "brittle" books-volumes disintegrating because they were printed on acidic paper. Today, the Library's Preservation Office administers this nation's largest library research and conservation effort.

1974

Librarian Mumford retires.

1975

President Gerald R. Ford nominated historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who had been director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology (now American History), to be the twelfth Librarian of Congress. Boorstin was confirmed by the Senate and took the oath of office on November 12, 1975, in a ceremony in the Library's Great Hall.

The Library of Congress grew steadily during Boorstin's administration. He took a keen personal interest in collection development, in copyright, in book and reading promotion, in the symbolic role of the Library of Congress in American life, and in the Library as "the world's greatest Multi-Media Encyclopedia." Boorstin's style and accomplishments increased the visibility of the Library to the point where in January 1987 a New York Times reporter, discussing Boorstin's decision to retire as Librarian, called the post of Librarian of Congress "perhaps the leading intellectual public position in the nation."

1987

Boorstin's successor, historian James H. Billington, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and took the oath of office as the thirteenth Librarian of Congress. Billington immediately instituted a one-year review through a Management and Planning (MAP) Committee, a process that included regional forums in nine cities. The result was a major administrative reorganization based on goals identified through the MAP study. He instituted the American Memory project, providing electronic copies of selected collections of American history and culture to schools and libraries. A two-year pilot project providing on-line access to the Library to the fifty state library agencies began in 1991.

1991

Billington obtained a 12 percent budget increase for the Library to help make its collections more accessible. New initiatives also provided Library of Congress guidance to parliamentary libraries in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe.

Present

Librarian Billington's determination to extend the reach and influence of the Library of Congress is very much in the ambitious tradition of his predecessors. Alone among the world's great libraries, the Library of Congress still attempts to be a universal library, collecting printed materials in almost all media.

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