With Librarian of Congress Stepping Down, An Opportunity to Bring the LOC into the Digital Age

Under the leadership of current Librarian of Congress James Billington, the Library of Congress has earned a reputation as a technology laggard with a spotty record on everything from digitizing records to improving archaic IT systems. And so, as the 86-year-old Billington steps down, tech advocates are pushing for an Internet-savvy replacement -- seeing a rare chance to modernize a cultural and policy-making institution that’s fallen far behind in the digital age.

The challenges in modernizing the Library of Congress are daunting. The institution has neglected to digitize many of the country’s founding documents; George Washington’s papers are online, for example, but Thomas Jefferson’s largely aren’t. The Copyright Office, housed inside the library, is largely paper-based, full of row upon row of musty card catalogs. A highly publicized project to archive every Twitter message -- announced five years ago -- has yet to materialize. And a spring report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Library could not calculate how many computers it has. “The Librarian of Congress should be like the Pope of libraries,” setting the tone and the agenda for libraries as a whole, says John Blyberg, director of the highly-regarded public library system in Darien (CT). “People in that position are going to need the technical chops to understand what the issues are,” while having political savvy to operate in Washington, he said.