Following is an excerpt of a speech delivered Aug. 21 by the Librarian of Congress at the 67th International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Council and General Conference in Boston.
"The basic challenge now facing American libraries— and American society more generally today—is whether adding electronics means subtracting books, and losing in the process the values of the book culture that made democracy and the responsible use of freedom possible in the first place. We are, in short, faced with the greatest upheaval in the transmission of knowledge since the invention of the printing press: the electronic onslaught of multimedia, digital communication. It bypasses the traditional limits of time and space and raises the haunting question of whether libraries—those historic houses of refuge for reading, those temples of pluralism and seed beds of humanism—can continue to serve as hospitals for the soul in a medium that so far basically markets commodities for the body.
To use the language of cyberspeak: Is this post-Gutenberg world that is becoming hominized (that is to say brought under the control of an individual with a keyboard and screen) also becoming dehumanized (no longer serving worthy human ends)? Is communication replacing community? Are the new digital enhancements deepening social inequality by disproportionately favoring those who already have money and education to use them? And above all, is virtual reality displacing real virtue?
Public libraries, by their nature, have constructive answers to all these questions; and American libraries have already prepared themselves by bringing the new electronics more seamlessly and systematically into their traditional services than have many other public institutions.
Let me briefly describe how the Library of Congress has been working for more than a decade now to help meet these challenges and perform its traditional historic functions of acquiring, preserving, processing and making accessible materials in the new digital age.
The Library of Congress assumed the broad functions of a true national library in the late 19th and early 20th century, when it acquired the mint record of American creativity through copyright deposit, gathered in most papers of presidents up to Hoover, collected unparalleled records of Native and African American culture, assumed most of the burden of cataloging for the library system as a whole, and produced free materials nationwide for the blind and physically handicapped.
The basic direction of where to go beyond electronic cataloging in producing services for the digital age for the Library of Congress emerged from a series of 12 forums that we coordinated with thousands of librarians all over the country in 1988. From these came the idea for the American Memory pilot project with CD ROMS in 44 schools and libraries across the country in the early 1990s. Then, of course, came the explosion of the Internet, and American Memory was amplified in the late 1990s into a National Digital Library Program, which, by the end of 2000, … had put 7 million items of American history and culture online [www.loc.gov]. Just as the Library had traditionally lent other American libraries books through interlibrary loans free of charge, we were now providing digitized versions of our massive—and often one-of-a-kind—special collections free of charge to libraries everywhere.
We used part of the private money that largely funded this program to subsidize adding unique American historical materials from 37 other institutions, libraries and repositories from all over America to this American Memory Web site. We were trying to bring one-of-a-kind primary materials of broad interest and importance from special collections, which only a few had had access to and only in a special place, out to a broader audience but at the same time into the world of books, since American Memory was designed as an archival transfer and bridge to other libraries. We are trying to help bridge the resource gap between major repositories and local libraries; to blend old material into the new technology; and to provide memory for an inherently ephemeral medium that is forever updating information and erasing previous drafts.
What was new for the Library of Congress was the assumption of a broad and nationwide educational function in an institution previously focused on serving Congress, the government, the scholarly community and the broader public mainly as a library of last resort.
American libraries have always served as local centers of lifelong learning. So a more active role for the national library was fully in keeping with the growing bipartisan recognition in political Washington that better education is essential for dealing with almost all our national and international problems. By raising large amounts of private, philanthropic money for the first time in the Library's history, we were able to sustain the historical American library tradition of providing to the public even this expensive new type of material free of charge.
As technological change accelerated and the educational crisis deepened in the 1990s, it has become clear that there are three separate, sequential needs, each of which has to be met if American libraries are to sustain their historic function of transmitting inert stored knowledge democratically to a broad and diverse population.
First is the need to place on the Web educational content that is easily accessible, of dependable quality and free of charge for everyone.
Second is the need to provide the hardware and software that can deliver this positive content to public institutions like libraries and schools where everyone can access them freely in local communities everywhere.
Third is the need for human mediators within those public institutions who can serve the special needs of a community and help integrate the new online knowledge with the older wisdom in books.
Only the second and the most impersonal of these needs has begun to be met. Both public and private funders in America have been relatively generous in equipping public schools and libraries with the hardware and software for new educational efforts. But the humanizing first and third stages that would provide free humanistic content at one end and humane guidance in its use at the other have yet to be seriously subsidized in America.
The Library of Congress has in recent years been trying to address precisely these two areas of national need with additional new programs that reach beyond our original National Digital Library Program.
For the first stage of generating positive free content, Congress, led by Senator Stevens of Alaska, has begun to extend our national program to a global one by providing funds for a project in which the Library of Congress is collaborating with the national libraries of Russia and with other repositories in both countries. We have already digitized and put online nearly 100,000 primary documents that illustrate our parallel experience of these two former adversaries as continent-wide frontier societies, adding bilingual text from our curators. We have started another such project with Spain and are in advanced discussions with two others. Our collaborative multinational projects are becoming more widely accessible through the electronic gateway of the Bibliotheca Universalis. Representatives from the G7, and six other European countries are coordinating their policies for digitizing primary documents. All 13 participants have already contributed content for this Web site, and all this should eventually feed into a global online library and network.
"… The role of the librarian has become more, rather than less, important: to help learners of all ages make connections between print and electronic materials, and to help navigate through the sea of illiterate chatter, undependable infotainment and gratuitous sex and violence that is proliferating and that many say is the only real profit-making on the Internet. The Internet tends to feed upon itself rather than independently validate the material it transmits. You may have seen the lines making the rounds of library e-mail: "A Zen librarian searched for ‘nothing' on the Internet and received 28 million hits."
The Library of Congress is trying to help develop librarianship for the new era through a variety of programs that, like the Internet itself, are inherently cooperative and networked activities. I am glad to be speaking with all of you. We will all have to be working much more interactively together.
Our Collaborative Digital Reference Service is now available worldwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The first question asked on it a year ago came from a Londoner seeking information on Byzantine cooking. It was routed through a Library of Congress file server and answered in a few hours by a librarian in Santa Monica, Calif.
We have two programs that have begun to put tables of contents on the Web—throwing open the door to those who browse the Internet for information as well as those who use our online public access catalog. One program is an enhancement of the Library's Electronic Cataloging in Publication Program. We now enter some tables of contents directly from the electronic galleys into the online bibliographic record without having to rekey the data. A second program scans and provides the tables from already printed publications—encouraging catalogers and reference librarians to decide which are most broadly important.
We have also set up a project to link Library of Congress catalog records with the full-text electronic versions of many social service monographic series of the working-paper type, such as those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
A fourth new program will provide full online information about new books, including jacket blurbs, summary, sample text and author information. …
Finally, the Library of Congress has initiated a project to identify those international Web resources that are of most value to researchers and scholars. When completed, the project will produce an international home page with pointers to reliable online resources for all of the nations of the world. By mid-September, portals for 20 countries will be available to users worldwide.
By far the most difficult new challenge looming for librarianship will be preserving and providing access to "born-digital" materials, that swelling mass of material that appears only in electronic form. We have defined our task at the Library of Congress in recent years as "getting the champagne out of the bottle." But here the problem of capturing bubbles is another matter. Digital material and the technology to use it are constantly changing and evanescent. The average life of a Web site is only about 75 days, and a growing body of important material has already been lost forever.
Election 2000 is our first large-scale collection of data-searchable Web sites to be archived and made available online. We chose the subject long before the election became so historic. It was conceived by the Library's specialists and developed in cooperation with the Internet Archive and Compaq Computer. It collected copies of more than 1,000 election-related Web sites, gathering some 2 million megabytes between Aug. 1, 2000, and Jan. 14, 2001, archiving many times a day—and often hourly—in order to record candidate responses to each other and to demonstrate at the same time the dynamic nature of Internet content.
Last year Congress directed a major special appropriation to the Library of Congress to develop and begin implementing a national plan cooperatively with other governmental and private institutions in order to preserve for future access important born-digital materials.
Congress deserves great credit for supporting all the work that the Library of Congress is doing to preserve and make accessible the nation's creative heritage and now much of the world's knowledge. Consistently for 201 years, on a bipartisan basis, our national legislature has been the greatest patron of a single library in the history of the world. And, in the last decade generous private donors have also helped us in many new ways to get the champagne out of the bottle. Nothing, I repeat, nothing, would be possible, however, without our truly dedicated and diversely talented staff, so many of whom you have had a chance to know at these IFLA meetings over the years. The Library of Congress is doing more work with fewer people than 10 years ago. The staff is doing it all, and they are all, as a body and individually, every bit as great a national treasure as our 121 million-item collection.
"… Without books, the Internet risks becoming a game without a story—the game of mergers, speculations, increasingly violent video games, a surfing game on the surface of life, motion without memory—one of the clinical definitions of insanity. …
Properly used, the Internet will help scientifically to solve common problems shared by widely dispersed groups in fields like medicine and the environment, and at the same time to share online the primary documents that tell the distinctive stories of different peoples. …"
