At Library of Congress, changes are afoot in technology as well as in physical space

The Library of Congress no longer needs the computer room that visitors once used to search its electronic card catalogue. These days the entire library has a wireless Internet connection, so workers this summer put a collection of old microfilm machines in that room instead. Meanwhile, the library’s old-school physical catalogues, the kind filled with carefully penned index cards, have long since been relegated to cool basement hallways where schoolchildren marvel at their obscurity.

“I told them, ‘Before Google, this is what we used to do,’” said Fenella France, the library’s chief of preservation research. “They had never seen [card catalogues] before.” As libraries adapt to an increasingly networked and digital world, leading institutions are rethinking their use of physical spaces as well. At the Library of Congress, that means consolidating multiple reading rooms and making the experience of in-person researching more like the kind of one-stop shop we’ve come to expect online. Bill Kellum, who oversees Web and mobile initiatives at the library, is leading an effort to centralize online resources by reining in the sprawl of countless Web sites that sprang up independently from various divisions of the library in the 1990s. Something similar is happening offline as the library weighs a plan to merge several existing reading rooms into the Main Reading Room. Kellum and his team can imagine such Internet-connected appliances serving up Library of Congress resources such as Thomas Jefferson’s 200-year-old recipe for vanilla ice cream.