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2/22/91
JEFFERSON'S LEGACY: THE FUNCTIONS OF
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PAST AND PRESENT
by John Y. Cole
Director, Center for the Book
Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20540-8200
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NOTE: (#) Denotes an end-note number.
The Library of Congress occupies a unique place in American
civilization. Established as a legislative library in 1800, it
grew into a national institution in the nineteenth century and,
since World War II, has become an international resource of
unparalleled dimension.
In 1950, the sesquicentennial year of the Library of Congress,
the eminent librarian S.R. Ranganathan paid the Library and the
U.S. Congress an unusual tribute:
"The institution serving as the national library of
the United States is perhaps more fortunate than its
predecessors in other countries. It has the Congress as
its godfather. . . This stroke of good fortune has made
it perhaps the most influential of all the national
libraries of the world."(1)
Forty years later, the Library built by the American Congress
has achieved an even greater degree of prominence. Since 1950 the
size of its collections and its staff have tripled and its annual
appropriation has soared from $9 million to $300 million. With
collections totaling over 90 million items in most formats,
subjects, and languages, a staff of 4,800 persons, and services
unmatched in scope by any other research library, the Library of
Congress is one of the leading cultural institutions of the
world.(2)
The diversity of the Library of Congress, is startling. It is
1) a legislative library and the major research arm for the U.S.
Congress; 2) the copyright agency of the United States; 3) a public
institution open without restriction to everyone over high school
age; 4) a government library that serves executive agencies and the
judiciary; 5) a national library for the blind and physically
handicapped; 6) the world's largest producer of bibliographic data;
and 7) an international institution that collects research
materials from throughout the world in more than 400 languages and
operates seven overseas acquisitions offices. Its Chinese,
Japanese, and Russian collections are the largest outside of these
countries and its Arabic collections are the largest outside of
Egypt.
In order to perform these functions, the Library of Congress
occupies three massive structures on Capitol Hill, near the U.S.
Capitol. The Jefferson Building, opened in 1897, is a grand
monument to civilization, culture, and American achievement. The
austere Adams Building, opened in 1938, functions primarily as a
giant bookstack for over 12 million of the Library's approximately
20 million books and pamphlets. The modern Madison Building,
completed in 1980, with its 2.5 million square feet of space, is by
far the largest structure. The Library operates 22 reading rooms
in these three buildings. Over two million researchers, scholars,
and tourists visit the Library of Congress each year.
Since its creation, the Library of Congress has been part of
the legislative branch of the American government, and even though
it is recognized as the de facto national library of the United
States, it is not officially designated as a national library. Yet
it performs most of the functions performed by most national
libraries and has become a symbol of American democracy and faith
in the power of learning.
How did a library established by the legislature for its own
use become such an ambitious, multi-purpose institution? Two
points are clear: the expansion of the Library's functions derives
from the expansion of its collections; and the growth of the
institution is tied to the growth and ambitions of the entire
American nation. The development of the Library of Congress cannot
be separated from the history of the nation it serves. Nor can it
be separated from the aspirations and achievements of three
individuals who shaped the institution and its functions: Thomas
Jefferson, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, and Herbert Putnam.
The Library of Congress was established as the American
legislature prepared to move from Philadelphia to the new capital
city of Washington. On April 24, 1800, President John Adams
approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase "such
books as may be necessary for the use of Congress." The first
books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the
U.S. Capitol, the Library's first home. On January 26, 1802,
President Thomas Jefferson approved the first law defining the role
and functions of the new institution. This measure created the
post of Librarian of Congress and gave Congress, through a Joint
Committee on the Library, the authority to establish the Library's
rules and regulations. From the beginning, however, the
institution was more than a legislative library, for the 1802 law
made the appointment of the Librarian of Congress a presidential
responsibility. It also permitted the President and Vice President
to borrow books, a privilege that, in the next two decades, was
extended to the judiciary and to most government agencies.
Three developments in the Library's early history permanently
established the institution's national roots. First, the Library
of Congress was created by the NATIONAL legislature, which took
direct responsibility for its operation. Secondly, the Library of
Congress served as the first library of the American GOVERNMENT.
Finally, in 1815, the scope of the Library's collection was
permanently expanded. The philosophy and ideals of the Library's
principal founder, Thomas Jefferson (1732-1826), were the key to
this transformation.
Bibliophile and book collector extraordinaire, Jefferson took
a keen interest in the Library and its collection while he was
President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Throughout his
presidency, he personally recommended books for the Library, and he
appointed the first two Librarians of Congress. In 1814 the
British army invaded Washington and burned the Capitol, including
the 3,000-volume Library of Congress. By then retired to
Monticello, Jefferson offered to sell his personal library to the
Congress to "recommence" its library. The purchase was approved in
1815, doubling the size of the Library of Congress and, more
significantly, expanding it beyond the scope of a legislative
library devoted primarily to legal, economic, and historical works.
Jefferson's library reflected his wide-ranging interests in
subjects such as architecture, science, geography, and literature.
It included books in French, German, Latin, Greek, and one three-
volume statistical work in Russian. Jefferson believed that a
democratic legislature needed information on all subjects and in
many languages in order to do its job. Anticipating the argument
that his collection might be too comprehensive for use by a
legislative body, he argued that there was "no subject to which a
Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."(3)
The acquisition by Congress of Jefferson's library forever
broadened the scope of the Library of Congress and provided the
base for the expansion of the Library's functions. The
Jeffersonian concept of universality is of fundamental importance
as both the philosophy and the rationale behind the comprehensive
collecting policies of today's Library of Congress.
Congressman who favored the purchase of Jefferson's library
argued that it would make "a most admirable substratum for a
National Library," expressing a growing cultural nationalism in the
United States. Many Americans, aware of the cultural dependence of
the United States on Europe, were anxious that their country
establish its own traditions and institutions. For example, an
editorial in the July 15, 1815 (Washington, D.C.) daily NATIONAL
INTELLIGENCER pointed out: "In all civilized nations of Europe
there are national libraries. . . In a country of such general
intelligence as this, the Congressional or National Library of the
United States (should) become the great repository of the
literature of the world."
Yet in the early 1850's it appeared that the Smithsonian
Institution might become the American national library. Its
talented and aggressive librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett, tried to
move the institution in that direction and turn it into a national
bibliographical center as well. Jewett's efforts were opposed,
however, by Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry, who insisted that
the Smithsonian focus its activities on scientific research and
publication. In fact, the Secretary favored the eventual
development of a national library at the Library of Congress, which
he viewed as the appropriate foundation for "a collection of books
worthy of a Government whose perpetuity principally depends on the
intelligence of the people." On July 10, 1854, Henry dismissed
Jewett, ending any possibility that the Smithsonian might become
the national library. Moreover, 12 years later Henry was to
transfer the entire 40,000-volume library of the Smithsonian
Institution to the Library of Congress.
In all, the Library of Congress suffered difficult times
during the 1850's. In the first place, the growing intersectional
rivalry between North and South hindered the strengthening of any
government institution. Furthermore, in late 1851 the most serious
fire in the Library's history destroyed about two-thirds of its
55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of Jefferson's library.
Congress responded quickly and generously: in 1852 a total of
$168,700 was appropriated to restore the Library's rooms in the
Capitol and to replace the lost books. But the books were to be
replaced only, with no particular intention of supplementing or
expanding the collection. This policy reflected the conservative
philosophy of Senator James A. Pearce of Maryland, the chairman of
the Joint Committee on the Library, who favored keeping a strict
limit on the Library's activities. In fact, a few years later, the
Library lost two of its most important governmental functions. On
January 28, 1857, a joint resolution transferred responsibility for
the distribution of public documents to the Bureau of the Interior,
and responsibility for the international exchange of books and
documents on behalf of the U.S. government was shifted to the
Department of State. Back in 1846, when the Smithsonian
Institution was founded, both the Smithsonian and the Library of
Congress were designated repositories for U.S. copyright deposits.
On February 5, 1859, with the consent of Library officials, this
law was repealed.
Two years later, a new President replaced Librarian Meehan.
President Lincoln's choice was John G. Stephenson, an Indiana
physician who served as Librarian of Congress until the end of
1864. As the Civil War came to a close, the Library had a total
staff of seven and a mediocre collection of only 80,000 volumes;
nonetheless the "national character" of its origins and first 64
years was indisputable.
The individual responsible for transforming the Library of
Congress into an institution of national significance was Ainsworth
Rand Spofford, a former Cincinnati bookseller and journalist who
served as Librarian of Congress from 1865 until 1897. Spofford
accomplished this task by permanently linking the legislative and
national functions of the Library, first in practice and then,
through the 1897 reorganization of the Library, in law. He
provided his successors as Librarian with four essential
prerequisites for the development of an American national library:
(1) firm congressional support for the notion of the Library of
Congress as both a legislative and a national library; (2) the
beginning of a comprehensive collection of Americana; (3) a
magnificent new building, itself a national monument; and (4) a
strong and independent office of Librarian of Congress. It was
Spofford who had the interest, skill, and perseverance to
capitalize on the Library of Congress' claim to a national role.
Each Librarian of Congress since Spofford has shaped the
institution in a different manner, but none has wavered from
Spofford's assertion that the Library was both a legislative and a
national library.
Spofford revived the idea of an American national library,
which had been languishing since Jewett's departure from the
Smithsonian in 1854, and convinced first the Joint Committee on the
Library and then the Congress itself that the Library of Congress
was also a national institution. Spofford and Jewett shared
several ideas relating to a national library; in particular, both
recognized the importance of copyright deposit in developing a
comprehensive collection of a nation's literature. Yet there was
a major difference in their views. Spofford never envisioned the
Library of Congress as the center of a network of American
libraries, a focal point for providing other libraries with
cataloging and bibliographic services. Instead, he viewed it, in
the European model, as a unique, independent institution -- a
single, comprehensive collection of national literature to be used
both by Congressmen and by the American people. Congress needed
such a collection because, as Spofford paraphrased Jefferson,
"there is almost no work, within the vast range of literature and
science, which may not at some time prove useful to the legislature
of a great nation." It was imperative, he felt, that such a great
national collection be shared with all citizens, for the United
States was "a Republic which rests upon the popular
intelligence."(4)
Immediately after the Civil War, American society began a
rapid transformation; one of the major changes was the expansion of
the federal government. Spofford took full advantage of the
favorable political and cultural climate, and the increasing
national confidence, to promote the Library's expansion. He always
believed that the Library of Congress WAS the national library and
he used every conceivable argument to convince others.
In the first years of his administration Spofford obtained
congressional approval of six laws or resolutions that ensured a
national role for the Library of Congress. The legislative acts
were:
1. an appropriation providing for the expansion of the Library in
the Capitol building, approved in early 1865;
2. the copyright amendment of 1865, which once again brought
copyright deposits into the Library's collections;
3. the Smithsonian deposit of 1866, whereby the entire library of
the Smithsonian Institution, a collection especially strong in
scientific materials, was transferred to the Library;
4. the 1867 purchase, for $100,000, of the private library of
historian and archivist Peter Force, establishing the
foundation of the Library's Americana and incunabula
collections;
5. the international exchange resolution of 1867, providing for
the development of the Library's collection of foreign public
documents; and
6. the copyright act of 1870, which centralized all copyright
registration and deposit activities at the Library.
Finally, in his 1872 annual report, Spofford presented a plan for
a separate Library of Congress building, initiating an endeavor
that soon dominated his librarianship.
Spofford's most impressive collection-building feat, and
certainly the one that had the most far-reaching significance for
the Library, was the centralization of all U.S. copyright deposit
and registration activities at the Library in 1870. The copyright
law ensured the continuing development of the Americana
collections, for it stipulated that two copies of every book,
pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered for copyright
in the United States be deposited in the Library. This act also
eventually forced the construction of a separate Library building,
for by 1875 all shelf space was exhausted and the books, "from
sheer force of necessity," were being "piled on the floor in all
directions."
In the long struggle for a separate Library building, Spofford
enlisted the support of many powerful public figures: Congressmen,
cultural leaders, journalists, and even Presidents. Moreover,
their speeches and statements usually endorsed not only a separate
building but also the concept of the Library of Congress as a
national library.
To Spofford also goes primary credit for establishing the
Library's tradition of broad public service. In 1865 he extended
the hours of service, so that the Library was open every weekday
all year. In 1869 he began advocating evening hours of opening,
but this innovation was not approved by Congress until 1898.
Finally, in 1870 Spofford reinstated the earlier policy of lending
books directly to the public if an appropriate sum was left on
deposit, a procedure that remained in effect until 1894, when
preparations were started for the move into the new Library
building.
In 1896, just before the actual move, the Joint Library
Committee held hearings about "the condition" of the Library and
its possible reorganization. The hearings provided an occasion for
a detailed examination of the Library's history and present
functions, furnished by Librarian Spofford, as well as for a review
of what new functions the Library might perform once it occupied
the spacious new building. The American Library Association sent
six witnesses, including future Librarian of Congress Herbert
Putnam from the Boston Public Library and Melvil Dewey from the New
York State Library. Congressmen listened with great interest to
the testimony of Putnam and Dewey, who argued that the national
services of the Library should be greatly expanded. Dewey felt
that the Library of Congress now had the opportunity to act as a
true national library, which he defined as "a center to which the
libraries of the whole country can turn for inspiration, guidance,
and practical help, which can be rendered so economically and
efficiently in no other possible way."(5)
Testimony at the 1896 hearings greatly influenced the
reorganization of the Library, which was incorporated into the
Legislative Appropriations Act approved February 19, 1897, and
became effective on July 1, 1897. In accordance with the
recommendations of Spofford, Putnam, Dewey, and the other officials
who testified, all phases of the Library's activities were
expanded. The size of the staff was increased from 42 to 108, and
separate administrative units for copyright, law, cataloging,
periodicals, maps, manuscripts, music, and graphic arts were
established. During his 32 years in office, and with the consent
of the Joint Library Committee, Librarian Spofford had assumed full
responsibility for directing the Library's affairs. This authority
formally passed to the office of Librarian of Congress in the 1897
reorganization, for the Librarian explicitly was assigned sole
responsibility for making the "rules and regulations for the
government" of the Library. The same reorganization act stipulated
that the President's appointment of a Librarian of Congress
thereafter was to be approved by the Senate.
President McKinley appointed a new Librarian of Congress to
supervise the move from the Capitol and implement the new
reorganization. He was John Russell Young, who held office from
July 1, 1897, until his death on January 17, 1899. A journalist
and former diplomat, Young was a skilled administrator who worked
hard to strengthen both the comprehensiveness of the collections
and the scope of the services provided to Congress. In February
1898, for example, he sent a letter to U.S. diplomatic and consular
representatives throughout the world, asking them to send "to the
national library" newspapers, serials, pamphlets, manuscripts,
broadsides, "documents illustrative of the history of those various
nationalities now coming to our shores to blend into our national
life," and many other categories of research materials, broadly
summarized as "whatever, in a word, would add to the sum of human
knowledge." By the end of 1898, books and documents had arrived
from 11 legations and seven consulates.
Young also inaugurated what today is one of the Library's best
known national activities, library service for the blind. In
November of 1897 the Library began a program of daily readings for
the blind in a special "pavilion for the blind" complete with its
own library. In 1913 Congress directed the American Printing House
for the Blind to begin depositing embossed books in the Library,
and in 1931 a separate appropriation was authorized for providing
"books for the use of adult blind residents of the United States."
Young's successor, Herbert Putnam, served as Librarian of
Congress for 40 years, from 1899 to 1939. The first experienced
professional librarian to hold the past, Putnam was able to
establish a working partnership between the Library of Congress and
the American library movement. In fact, three years after Putnam
had taken office, the Library of Congress was the leader among
American libraries. This turn of events was in accord with
Putnam's view of the proper role of a national library, a view
expressed at the 1896 hearings concerning the Library of Congress.
Rather than serving primarily as a great national accumulation of
books, a national library should, he felt, actively serve other
libraries. Building upon the tradition created by Spofford, Putnam
established a systematic program of widespread public service.
In the quarter century before Putnam took office, a new
structure of scientific and scholarly activity had evolved in the
United States. Professional schools and new universities offering
graduate work were established; numerous professional associations
and societies came into existence; and the federal government
became an active supporter of education, research, and scientific
activity. By 1900, as Arthur Bestor has pointed out, the age of
the great library had arrived in America; its characteristics
included huge bookstacks, scientific cataloging and classification,
and full-time professional staffs.(6) By the end of 1901 the
Library of Congress, the first American library to reach one
million volumes, had become part of this new pattern of
intellectual activity, for it had started organizing its enormous
collections of recorded knowledge for public service.
Putnam's actions in 1901 were imaginative and decisive and
were approved by both the Joint Library Committee and the
professional library community. In that year the first volume of
a completely new classification scheme, based on the Library's own
collections, was published; access to the Library was extended to
"scientific investigators and duly qualified individuals"
throughout the United States; an interlibrary loan service was
inaugurated; the sale and distribution of Library of Congress
printed catalog cards began; the equivalent of a national union
catalog was started; and finally, appended to the 1901 annual
report was a 200-page manual describing the organization,
facilities, collections, and operations of the Library -- a
description that set high standards for all other libraries.
Librarian Putnam's sharing of the Library's "bibliographic
apparatus" helped shape and systematize American scholarship and
librarianship and propelled the Library into a position of
leadership among the world's research institutions.(7) The
development of the Library's collections into a nationally useful
resource was a key Putnam goal. To aid historical research, he
felt that the national library "should be able to offer original
sources." Material pertinent to a certain region "should be left
to the local library having a particular duty to that locality,"
but "material relating to the country as a whole" should come to
the Library of Congress.(8) In 1903 Putnam persuaded his friend
and supporter, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, to issue an
executive order that transferred the papers of most of the nation's
founders (including those of Jefferson) from the State Department
archives to the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress --
the beginning of the Library's presidential papers collection,
which today includes the papers of the first twenty-three
Presidents.
The Librarian was especially far-sighted in acquiring research
materials about other countries and cultures. In 1904 he purchased
a 4,000-volume library of Indica, explaining in the Library's
annual report that he "could not ignore the opportunity to acquire
a unique collection which scholarship thought worthy of prolonged,
scientific, and enthusiastic research, even though the immediate
use of such a collection may prove meager." In 1906 he boldly
acquired the 80,000-volume private library of Russian literature
owned by G.V. Yudin of Siberia, even sending a staff member to
Russia to supervise the packing and shipping of the books. Large
and important collections of Hebraica, Chinese, and Japanese books
were also acquired.
A traditional function, legislative support, was strengthened
in 1914 when a separate Legislative Reference Service was
established. Putnam established new functions as well; many of
them resulted from the creation of the Library of Congress Trust
Fund Board in 1925. This act enabled the Library to accept gifts
and bequests from private citizens. This new private funding,
which supplemented the annual government appropriation, allowed the
Library to hold chamber music concerts, to establish a series of
consultantships for scholars, to purchase new material, and in
general, as Putnam stated, in his 1925 annual report, to "do for
American scholarship and cultivation what is not likely to be done
by other agencies." The success of the Trust Fund Board was of
crucial importance to the Librarian's vision of the nationalization
of the Library's collections and services.
The role of the Library of Congress as a symbol of American
democracy was enhanced by Putnam in 1921 when the nation's two most
precious documents, the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution, were transferred to the Library from the State
Department. In 1924 the documents went on permanent public display
in a specially-designed "Shrine" in the Library's Great Hall.
Calvin Coolidge, the President of the United States, and many other
dignitaries took place in the ceremony, but there were no speeches,
only the singing of two stanzas of "America." (The Library
transferred both documents to the National Archives in 1952.) In
1931, in his book THE EPIC OF AMERICA, historian James Truslow
Adams paid tribute to the Library of Congress "as a symbol of what
democracy can accomplish on its own behalf," noting that "anyone
who has used the great collections of Europe, with their
restrictions and red tape and difficulty of access, praises God for
democracy when he enters the stacks of the Library of Congress."(9)
The Library of Congress as a democratic institution and
repository of American cultural traditions was a concept that
captured the imagination of Putnam's successor, writer and poet
Archibald MacLeish. Appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt in
1939, MacLeish served as Librarian of Congress until the end of
1944, when he became assistant secretary of state. An advocate of
U.S. involvement in World War II, MacLeish urged all librarians to
"become active and not passive agents of the democratic process."
In 1941, the Library set aside a "democracy alcove" containing
books and writings about American democracy in the Main Reading
Room. MacLeish also was responsible for a major administrative
reorganization and for articulating the Jeffersonian rationale as
it applied to foreign materials, asserting, in his 1940 annual
report, that the Library should acquire the "written records of
those societies and peoples whose experience is of most immediate
concern to the people of the United States." Indeed, World War
II's most important effect on the Library was to stimulate further
development of its collections about other nations.
In this vein, political scientist Luther H. Evans, who served
as Librarian of Congress from 1945 to 1953, felt that the major
lesson of World War II was that "however, large our collections may
now be, they are pitifully and tragically small in comparison with
the demands of the nation." He described the need for larger
collections of research materials about foreign countries in
practical, patriotic terms, noting that during the war, while
weather data on the Himalayas from the Library's collections helped
the Air Force, "the want of early issues of the VOELKISCHE
BEOBACHTER prevented the first auguries of Naziism."
Through the leadership of Luther Evans, the Library of
Congress became committed to international library and cultural
cooperation.(10) The Library of Congress Mission in Europe,
organized by Evans and his Library of Congress colleague Verner W.
Clapp in 1945, acquired European publications for the Library and
for other American libraries. The Library soon initiated automatic
purchase agreements (blanket orders) 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.
In 1947, a Library of Congress Mission to Japan, headed by Clapp,
provided advice for the establishment of the National Diet Library.
Evans' successor as Librarian of Congress was L. Quincy
Mumford, who was director of the Cleveland Public Library in 1954
when he was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Eventually Mumford guided the Library through its greatest period
of national and international expansion. In the 1960's 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'
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. This was only the first step, however.
In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson approved the Higher
Education Act of 1965. Title IIC of the new law had great
significance for the Library of Congress and for academic and
research libraries. It authorized the Office of Education to
transfer funds to 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 of providing cataloging information for these materials
promptly after they had been received. This law came closer than
any other legislation affecting the Library of Congress to making
Jefferson's concept of comprehensiveness part of the Library's
official mandate. The new effort was christened the National
Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging (NPAC). The first NPAC
office was opened in London in 1966. By 1971, the Library of
Congress had 13 overseas offices.
The development of international bibliographical standards was
now recognized as an important concern. The crucial development
had taken 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.
The Mumford administration, a period of rapid growth, was also
the last time there has been serious public debate about the dual
legislative and national roles of the Library of Congress. The
Library of Congress has played a leadership role in the American
library community since 1901; however, its FIRST responsibility, as
part of the legislative branch of the American government, always
has been to support the reference and research needs of the
American national legislature. In spite of the impressive list of
"national library functions" it performs, the Library of Congress
is not the official National Library of the United States or even
necessarily the center of American library and information
activities. It does not, for example, play the powerful national
role that the British Library has assumed under the terms of the
1972 British Library Act.
In 1962, at the request of Senator Claiborne Pell of the Joint
Library Committee, Douglas Bryant of the Harvard University Library
prepared a memorandum on "what the Library of Congress does and
ought to do for the Government and the Nation generally." Bryant
urged further expansion of the Library's national activities and
services, proposals endorsed by many professional librarians, and
suggested several organizational changes. Mumford replied to the
Bryant memorandum in his 1962 annual report, strongly defending the
Library's position in the legislative branch and reiterating his
opposition to changing or altering the Library's name to reflect
its national role: "The Library of Congress is a venerable
institution, with a proud history, and to change its name would do
unspeakable violence to tradition." The Librarian asserted that
"on the question of being the national library the substance is
more important than the form," and pointed out that, while
fulfilling its responsibilities to the legislature, the Library of
Congress also performed "more national library functions than any
other national library in the world."
The debate continued through the decade, however. For
example, in LIBRARIES AT LARGE (1967), a resource book based on
materials gathered for the new National Advisory Commission on
Libraries, an article by "the Staff of the Library of Congress"
described an ambitious set of programs that the Library of Congress
"might expand or undertake if it were formally recognized as the
National Library and acted accordingly."(11) But the fiscal
retrenchments of the 1970s and a reemphasis of the Library's
legislative services under the provisions of the Legislative
Reorganization Act of 1970 soon rendered any increased national
library aspirations impractical.
Librarian Mumford retired in 1974. The American Library
Association suggested the names of several professional librarians
for the job, but President Gerald R. Ford nominated historian
Daniel J. Boorstin, who had been director of the Smithsonian
Institution's Museum of American History. Boorstin had wide
support in Congress, but his nomination was opposed by the American
Library Association for the same reason it had opposed MacLeish's
in 1939: the nominee had no experience in administering a library.
Boorstin was confirmed without debate, however. He was sworn in on
November 12, 1975, in a ceremony in the Library's Great Hall that
signaled the new Librarian's sense of tradition. The oath of
office, taken on a Bible from the Jefferson collection, was
administered by Carl Albert, the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, with President Gerald R. Ford and Vice President
Nelson A. Rockefeller participating in the ceremony.
Boorstin immediately faced two major challenges: the need to
review the Library's organization and functions and the lack of
space for both collections and staff. His response to the first
was the creation of a Task Force on Goals, Organization, and
Planning, a staff group which conducted, with help from outside
advisors, a one-year review of the Library and its role. Many of
the Task Force's recommendations were incorporated into a
subsequent reorganization. The move into the Library's James
Madison Memorial Building, which began in 1980 and was completed in
1982, relieved administrative as well as physical pressures, and
enabled Librarian Boorstin to focus on what he deemed most
important: the strengthening of the Library's ties with Congress,
and the development of new relationships between the Library and
scholars, authors, publishers, cultural leaders, and the business
community.
The Library of Congress grew steadily during Boorstin's
administration, with its annual appropriation increasing from $116
million to over $250 million. Like MacLeish, Boorstin relied
heavily on his professional staff in technical areas such as
cataloging, automation, and library preservation. But 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 retirement, called the post of Librarian of Congress
"perhaps the leading intellectual public position in the nation."
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 on September 14, 1987.
Billington immediately took personal charge of the Library,
instituting his own one-year review through a Management and
Planning Committee and subsequently initiating a major
administrative reorganization. Convinced that the Library of
Congress needed to share its resources throughout the nation more
widely, he instituted several projects to use new technologies in
extending direct access to the Library's collections and data
bases. Envisioning a new educational role for the Library, he
strengthened its national cultural programming and initiated
national prizes for literary and intellectual achievement. A
Development Office to raise private funds was established in 1988.
The creation in 1990 of the James Madison National Council, a
private-sector support body consisting mostly of business
executives and entrepreneurs, brought new support. Working closely
with the U.S. Congress, Dr. Billington obtained a 12% budget
increase for the Library in fiscal 1991.
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 languages and
non-print materials in almost all media. As it approaches its
bicentennial in the year 2000, it still is guided by Thomas
Jefferson's belief that all subjects are important to the library
of the American national legislative -- and therefore to the
American people.
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END-NOTES
1. S.R. Ranganathan, "The Library of Congress Among National
Libraries," ALA BULLETIN 44 (October 1950): 356.
2. For a summary of the history of the Library of Congress and
its functions, see John Y. Cole, "For Congress & the Nation: The
Dual Nature of the Library of Congress," QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 32 (April 1975): 119-138. Unless otherwise
stated, dates and statistics are from John Y. Cole, FOR CONGRESS
AND THE NATION: A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
(Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979).
3. Jefferson to Samuel H. Smith, September 21, 1814, Jefferson
Papers, Library of Congress.
4. Ainsworth Rand Spofford, "The Government Library at
Washington," INTERNATIONAL REVIEW 5 (November 1878): 769.
5. U.S. Congress, Joint committee on the Library, CONDITION OF
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, March 3, 1897, 54th Cong., 2d sess., S.
Rept. 1573, p. 142.
6. Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., "The Transformation of American
Scholarship, 1875-1917," in LIBRARIANS, SCHOLARS, AND BOOKSELLERS
AT MID-CENTURY, ed. Pierce Butler (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1953), p. 19.
7. For a more detailed discussion, see John Y. Cole, "The Library
of Congress and American Scholarship, 1865-1939," in LIBRARIES AND
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION IN THE UNITED STATES: THE HISTORICAL
DIMENSION, ed. Phyllis Dain and John Y. Cole (N.Y.: Greenwood
Press, 1990), pp. 45-61.
8. Herbert Putnam, "The Relation of the National Library to
Historical Research in the United States," AMERICAN HISTORICAL
ASSOCIATION ANNUAL REPORT FOR 1901 (Washington, D.C., 1902), p.
120.
9. James Truslow Adams, THE EPIC OF AMERICA (N.Y.: Garden City
Books, 1931), p. 325.
10. For a more detailed discussion, see John Y. Cole, "The
International Role of the Library of Congress: A Brief History,"
ALEXANDRIA 1 (December 1989): 43-51.
11. Library of Congress Staff, "The Library of Congress as the
National Library: Potentialities for Service," in LIBRARIES AT
LARGE: TRADITION, INNOVATION, AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST, ed. by
Douglas M. Knight and E. Shepley Nourse (N.Y.: R.R. Bowker Company,
1969), pp. 435-465.
END
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