Library of Congress

of reasons. For one, Librarian of Congress at this point is a role that's typically appointed to ten year terms. Many historically have served much longer than that. Doctor Hayden had not served that period of time. And for another, federal law outlines the process of appointing a librarian, and it, like many other positions, is filled by the President nominating candidate and then the Senate has to confirm that candidate.

But it was very clear in this case that the intention was simply to replace doctor Hayden, and the President named Deputy Attorney General Todd blanche as acting head of the Library. He's the President's personal attorney. He absolutely does not have a library science degree or any practical knowledge

of the field. And in addition to those reasons for this being controversial, another one that should not be overlooked is that doctor Hayden has long been described by her peers and her colleagues as an exemplary librarian in every position that she has had, without exception. And in response to this dismissal, American Library Association President Cindy Hole issued a statement on behalf of the organization in support of

doctor Hayden. And this is a case where even GOP congress people have raised a red flag over this move, because, in addition to feeling as though the power of Congress has kind of been sidestepped, there are also so concerns about the White House having improper access to information regarding the Congressional Research Service, which handles confidential research requests all the time. We're going to talk about the origin point

of that service today. When two officials from Blanche's office arrived at the library on Monday, May twelfth, claiming to have jurisdiction there, they were denied entry. And that move on the part of the library was supported by congressional leadership from both sides of the aisle, and then when questioned about that dismissal, the president's Press secretary said that doctor Hayden was fired because she was quote putting inappropriate

books in the library for children. Okay, that's a needle scratch moment for me, because the Library of Congress doesn't lend books to children. It's not a circulating library. It doesn't lend books to anyone. It's a research library, and that means that all of the books and other materials stay on the premises. There is also an age limit. No one under the age of sixteen is allowed to

do research there. Well, there are some children's programs, anyone under the age of sixteen, even attending those has to be accompanied by an adult, and there are children's collections, but most of that material is held as part of the library's responsibility as the nation's center for copyright. So that excuse didn't really hold water. And it also evidence the fact that there are people that do not know

what the Library of Congress is or does. So today we are going to talk about its history, how it came to have some of the responsibilities it does. I'm qualifying that by saying some of the responsibilities because the Library of Congress has a lot of responsibilities. It is a massive place in both physical scale and in the scale of its services. We're going to start in eighteen hundred,

which was an important year in US history. Up to that point, as we've mentioned at various times on the show, the US government was operating out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but that year the government moved to Washington, d C. The move to DC had been planned for a decade. In the Residents Act of seventeen ninety, Washington had been selected as the new capital in an effort to find a neutral spot that was not considered either north or south.

This is part of a compromise over the issue of slavery. Pro slavery southern states were concerned that a capital in an abolitionist state would automatically be slanted against their interests, which meant that the other states are willing to kind

of appease the South on this. There were other factors in the mix as well, but this decision was made that a new city would be developed on at tract of land that straddled Virginia and Maryland, and in the meantime, Philadelphia would continue to serve as the capital for another decade while this new municipality was being planned and built.

On April twenty fourth, eighteen hundred, as part of a larger congressional Act that officially moved the government to Washington, d C. Five thousand dollars was allocated for books, and that made it the first budget of what would become the Library of Congress. A committee was also formed to administer those funds and oversee the day to day functions of this new library, which was going to be housed

in the Capitol building. The first iteration of the collection was just one hundred and fifty two items, and it was kept in the Secretary of Senate's office. An order was placed in spring of eighteen hundred with a bookseller in London to purchase seven hundred and forty more items to expand the library's holdings. In eighteen oh two, during Thomas Jefferson's presidency, the library was moved to its own

room in the capital's North Wing. That same year, the position of Librarian of Congress was established as a presidential appointment. So let's clarify this a little bit. This library is a legislative office. It's not a lending library like a local library branch. The Library of Congress was always intended to serve Congress research materials. There were consulted when legislation was being drafted or when Congressmen wanted to study up

on a topic that was being discussed. In addition to books, that meant research materials like maps and surveys that could inform the way the country would grow. In that initial period, when the Librarian of Congress was paid two dollars a day, only members of Congress, the President, and vice president could access this collection.

He actually became one of the first city councilmen of Richmond, Virginia, and as he rose through the ranks politically, he moved first to New York and then to Philadelphia, and along the way he became a close ally of Thomas Jefferson. He actually campaigned for Jefferson and against Federalist politicians, often writing political commentaries in various papers under pseudonyms.

Clerk of the House of Representatives. The catalog of the books, maps, and charts belonging to the Library of the two Houses of Congress was a guide to the initial collection of nine hundred and sixty four items in that initial small offering. Beckley held the library in office until eighteen oh seven, when he died. During the later part of his tenure, the collection moved from its dedicated space as that area was reallocated to use for the House of Representatives, and

the library was temporarily kind of nomadic. It moved from room to room while a more permanent solution was sought after. I don't know why that tickles me, knowing it literally was getting shuffled around from like conference room to coucy. We need this one for a meeting. Yeah, you got to move the Library of Congress out of it before

a permanent space was found. Though. In eighteen fourteen, during the War of eighteen twelve, Washington, d c. Was burned down by British forces, and this destroyed the Library of Congress in its entirety. Thomas Jefferson, who had steered the early years of the library as we've discussed, had retired to his home Monticello at this point, and he read

about the fire in the paper. He almost immediately wrote to a friend quote, I learned from the newspapers that the vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington over science as well as the arts, by the destruction of the Public Library with the Noble edifice in which it

was deposited. Jefferson had himself amassed a pretty impressive library with a lot of rare volumes collected from Europe over the years, and he had always intended that he was going to leave the collection to the Library of Congress when he died, although he wanted the government to pay his estate for it. This is a thing that I find kind of funny. There are write ups about this that are like, he donated his No, he didn't donate, he sold it. Let's be clear. There was a transaction involved.

But in light of the fire, he just sped up his plan and he offered his full collection, which was believed to be six four hundred eighty seven books, to replace that lost Library of Congress collection, which had at that point been less than half that size, and he was paid twenty three, nine hundred and fifty dollars for the entirety of it, which it actually turned out was larger than he had realized when he started really going through it and prepping it. It was six thousand, seven

hundred seven books total. He did not ask for any additional money for the extra books. This was actually kind of controversial in a variety of ways. Some people thought volumes in his collection were not appropriate for the government to own and that he was making a cash grab. But in any case, it did replenish the library, and Jefferson used the money to settle a number of debts, and he sent the collection, including its bookcases, to Washington. The last wagon load was sent to the Capitol on

May eighth, eighteen fifteen. Coming up, we'll talk about the newly replenished library collection and where it was stored, but first we will hear from the sponsors that keep the

show going. Initially, the new Library of Congress collection acquired from Thomas Jefferson, as well as new volumes as they were added, lived in the hotel that served as the temporary home of the Capitol post fire, and then in eighteen eighteen it moved back into the rebuilt Capitol building, where it was stored in the attic as a temporary option. This was like an attic that had functional use, It

wasn't just like shoved up there. It took six years, though, for a purpose built room in the building to be created by architect Charles Bullfinch. On December twenty second, eighteen twenty five, just a year after that new room was ready, there was another fire. This one was an accident. It was started by a candle, and the fire was caught relatively early and extinguished, but it instigated discussions about fireproofing to prevent this growing collection from being lost as the

first one was. But nothing came of these discussions, and on December twenty fourth, eighteen fifty one, there was another fire at the Library of Congress. This one also an accident. Thirty five thousand books were destroyed, including more than half of the books that had come from Jefferson's collection. The eighteen fifty one fire made it apparent that the Library of Congress would always be vulnerable unless steps were taken to help ensure the safety of the collection.

was the newly acquired Library of the Smithsonian Institution. That new material on its own totaled about forty thousand volumes. It really was starting to seem like the library's physical home could just never keep up with its very rapid expansion. But things were actually about to get much more intense in terms of collection growth. In eighteen seventy, the Library of Congress became the center of copyright in the US.

This happened as part of the Copyright Law of eighteen seventy, which began as an act to revise, consolidate, and amend the statutes relating to patents and copyrights. By making the Library of Congress so central to copyright claims, Congress U and President Grant had inadvertently created a new problem. As part of the law, the library was given two copies of all copyrighted items. Soon that meant it was under an avalanche of copyright deposits and it ran out of room.

It wasn't until eighteen eighty six that Congress authorized the construction of a purpose built building for the library. Yet another decade passed before that got built. Although Spofford made it clear that the crowding problems were just making it unfit for use in a lot of cases, he also made growth predictions to make it clear that Congress needed to be thinking long term about this collection. He said that he expected that by the nineteen seventies there would

be two point five million items in the collection. Yeah, that was an underestimation, but at the time it was a pretty good guess. The new building, though, did open on November first, eighteen ninety seven, just sixteen years from

when Spofford notified Congress of the space issues. By that point, rush full forty percent of the library collection had been acquired through copyright deposits, and along the way, Spofford had continued to write updated reports, noting in early eighteen ninety one that the collection had swelled to six hundred and fifty thousand books and more than two hundred thousand pamphlets. But the completed library, long though its gestation had been,

was a marvel. It was touted as the largest and the safest library in the world, and it had also come with a very high price tag. It had taken years of process, arguments, debate, and setbacks. There had been two architects on it initially, although each of them had been dismissed along the way, and ultimately the second one was replaced in eighteen ninety two by Edward Pierce Casey.

But then when Casey's father died in eighteen ninety six, Bernard R. Green stepped in to finish the building, and this building featured not only a beautiful Italian Renaissance exterior, but an interior that was filled with art and sculpture commissioned from USR artists, and it was nicknamed the Temple of the Arts. Also in eighteen ninety eight, the process for appointing a Librarian of Congress changed under the presidency

of Grover Cleveland. From then on, the President has been able to select a candidate, but the Senate has to approve that candidate. The eighteen ninety seven legislation also changed

the role of the library and officially. While it was initially a position that had less authority to make decisions about the collection than Congress did, Ainsworth Spofford had taken on a lot more responsibility in that role as the library had grown far beyond anything that could be managed as kind of a side job or part time project. So by the end of the nineteenth century, the role came with an established salary of five thousand dollars a year and a lot more autonomy about how the library

was staffed and run. A separate role of Superintendent of Grounds was also created, for the library, which also came with a five thousand dollars salary and perhaps most important at least to me, and we could talk about this on Friday. In eighteen ninety eight, catalogers were added to the library staff to review the collection catalog and to create a new classification system that could more effectively encompass the existing holdings and those that would be acquired in

the future. And this was the beginning of the Library of Congress Classification System or LCC that's used in many academic libraries today. Starting in nineteen oh two, the Library of Congress started selling pre printed catalog cards to other libraries. That meant that if a library was using the LCC system, when it acquired a new volume for its own collection, it could just purchase the already cataloged record for it

and add that card to the card catalog. That would save cataloging time for anybody young enough to have never used a card catalog. These cards were inserted into drawers in a specialty catalog cabinet. They were alphabetical, and users could search the catalog by looking for a subject, an author, or a title. So every volume typically had three cards,

one with each possible search approach headlined on it. Every one of a volume's associated cards would contain the volume's catalog number, so the user could jot that down and then go find the book or other material in the stacks. The money made from card sales went to the US Treasury. The card business grew rapidly as public and educational libraries signed on as subscribers. Soon it needed its own staff. My local library branch uses an old card catalog cabinet

as a seed library. Yeah. They've been repurposed in a lot of fun ways. I found myself so nostalgic trying to write out how a card catalog carn I was like, oh my gosh, we had to write down the call number.

the home of a great many important documents. That executive order was dated March ninth, nineteen oh three, and it made the personal papers of multiple founding fathers and records

of the Continental Congress part of the Library's collection. And this was the beginning of a lot of growth under library and Herbert Putnam, who not only enlarged the library's holdings, but also expanded the services that the library offered, creating more accessible research options for patrons, including a reference service with library staff available to assist with research requests. There were also new cultural programs like concerts added to the

library schedule. When World War One began, Putnam, at the request of the American Library Association, headed up a project to send books, periodicals, etc.

The documents got a dedicated shrine on February twenty eighth, nineteen twenty four, so not only were they carefully preserved, but visitors could also see them. They stayed in the library until nineteen fifty two, when they were transferred to the National Archive. Yeah, there's a little side trip that they took that we'll talk about in a minute. In nineteen thirty nine, the library got yet another building, designed

by the architecture firm of Pearson and Wilson. This building was simple in its layout, prioritizing workspaces for library visitors in addition to the book stacks, but simple did not mean small. This building was designed to hold ten million volumes. This building was originally called the Annex, and it retained that name until it was renamed the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building in nineteen seventy six under President Gerald Ford.

If you're familiar with the Library of Congress, you're like, that's not the Thomas Jefferson Building. That's because that was its name for only four years. In nineteen eighty, when another new library building was open, that's the James Madison Memorial Building. When that happened, the main library was renamed the Thomas Jefferson Building. The former Annex slash Thomas Jefferson Building became the John Adams Building. The nineteen forties were

an interesting time for the library. For one, there was a recognition that some of the collection needed to be preserved in new ways. Things like archival newspapers, which had not been intended to last long term when they were initially printed, were literally falling apart. The Library requested a small budget to commit some of the more important journals to microfilm for long term access that would not further degrade the collection, and of course their microfilm procedures and

program grew a huge amount from there. For another thing, World War II was deeply impactful for the library. Just as the fires of the earlier years had given rise to considerations as to how the collection might be protected, the war made Congress, then Library and Archibald MacLeish and President Franklin D. Roosevelt aware of the vulnerability of the nation's important documents and collections should an enemy power choose

to attack them. For this reason, during World War II, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, as well as the Library's Gutenberg Bible were all moved to Fort Knox, although that was not public knowledge at the time. Other valuable items were also moved to secret locations. This also included the Lincoln Cathedral copy of the Magna Carta, which the

British had brought to the US for safekeeping. The library also changed its hours and it was opened twenty four to seven for government officials during the war, while public use hours were cut down. The items that had been moved out for safety were returned to the library in the autumn of nineteen forty four. In nineteen forty four, the library was also the debut location for a ballet called Appalachian Spring, one of my favorite pieces of music. Please don't come at me for how I just said

the word Appalachian. The music was composed by Aaron Copeland and Arthur Graham choreographed it. The story of the ballet, which was commissioned by arts benefactor Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, was intended to capture a moment in the history of the US. It's about a couple in a Pennsylvania Shakertown during westward expansion. It starts with their wedding and follows them through their lives in a small town that's just getting established. Graham named the ballet after a line in a poem by

Hart Crane called the Bridge. When Copeland asked her if the poem had anything to do with the ballet, she told him quote, no, I just liked the title and I took it. It premiered in the library as Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium, which had been added to the Thomas Jefferson Library building in the nineteen twenties. Story of that ballet and Copeland and Graham's collaboration and sometimes lack thereof, is its own fascinating story. I highly recommend if you

like a little arts drama. Yeah, many years ago I almost sit an Aeron Copeland episode and I got like over wound, and I put it to the side and haven't returned to it. Every quote he has given about Martha Graham tickles the pants off me. It's so funny. It's very like, well, we were working on that. She didn't want him to see any of the ballet. He didn't see anything until the day before it debuted. He was still sending over music very late in the game, like there was just a lot of back and forth.

They were in the same place. So it was a very a huge achievement in terms of two artists that are maybe struggling to connect creating something that's really unique, but it also sounds like a wild ride. I can't imagine being one of the performers trying to like, Okay, we don't have what now? How soon do we open? In just a moment, we are going to talk about some of the services that formally became part of the Library's offerings after World War Two, but first we are

going to pause for a sponsor break. In nineteen forty six, a specialized research department was created for the Library through the Legislative Reorganization Act of nineteen forty six. This was the Library Reference Service, which had already existed to assist Congress with research needs, but this Act made it its own department with a budget so that specialists could be hired to make its offerings more robust. In nineteen seventy, the LRS was renamed the Congressional Research Service or CRS.

We referenced that at the very beginning of the episode, and it was restructured at that time with an expanded list of responsibilities, including assisting individual congress people and committees with policy research. In nineteen fifty eight, Librarian of Congress el Quincy Mumford established an entered Apartmental Committee on Mechanized Information Retrieval. That committee was tasked with figure out if there was a way to mechanize the catalog. We mentioned

the card cataloging system earlier. Over the years since the turn of the century, when the card catalog first started to be used to the Library of Congress's own card catalog had become so huge as to be unwieldy. There were more than nine million cards in the catalog in the nineteen fifties. In the autumn of nineteen fifty eight, an amendment to the Agricultural Trade, Development and Assistance Act of nineteen fifty four made overseas acquisitions for the library

more robust. The collection of foreign publications and materials was further bolstered in nineteen sixty five. The Higher Education Act of nineteen sixty five, as the name States, mandated that the library provide more services to academic libraries, but it also enabled the library to use funds for collecting materials from around the world under the guiding principle that those

materials had to be quote of value to scholarship. That also meant that those materials needed to be cataloged, and for those cataloging records to be offered to other libraries quickly through their cataloging distribution program. This can be a huge challenge. Cataloging foreign language volumes requires a degree of linguistic proficiency on the part of the cataloger, so multi lingual specialists became an important part of the cataloging staff

within a short period of time. The library had office presences in both London and Rio de Janeiro to acquire books from abroad. During the nineteen sixties, the library also spearheaded research into book preservation, focusing not on its oldest volumes, but books printed in the late nineteenth century. That's because changes in paper production actually made a lot of those books more susceptible to paper breakdown than a lot of

older pieces in the collection. This was the the beginning of the development of standards of preservation practices and ongoing research in preservation science that continues today under the Library's Preservation Directorate. In nineteen sixty six, the committee that we mentioned earlier that was formed to explore ways to automate search in the catalog came up with a system that

was called machine readable Cataloging. Mark records as they were called, still included all of the information that would normally be found on a catalog card, but they were the first digital cataloging records, searchable through a terminal. Soon, subscribers could also get these digital files just as they had catalog cards.

Although they were initially shipped on magnetic tapes, there were still physical cards going into the Library of Congress's catalog and being shipped to libraries that had not transitioned to electronic data use. But the intention was to move everyone

away from physical cards. I kind of marveled that this started in nineteen six It seems so much earlier than I remembered, even from when I was learning about it on the job, I had the same response, which led me to google it to check, which led me to lead to me learning that the person who was really the key in the development of this was named Henriette Abraham, which is I was like, is this somebody we need

to talk about on the show. Maybe I looked at her and I felt like I didn't have enough handy material for an expansion, that she would be awesome if we had some time to really dig in. So the last day of nineteen eighty, so December thirty first, was also the last day that any physical cards went into the Library of Congress catalog. Starting in nineteen eighty one, Mark supplanted physical cards completely and cataloging new items moved

entirely online. Older items, though, were still represented in the collection by catalog cards. This is all so why I remember in my youth there were some things that we would look up in the physical card catalog, and some things that we would look up in this terminal thing that also.

and a much needed expansion of library space. The two point one million square foot building was one of the largest in Washington, d C. And, among other services, the Copyright Office was moved there. One of the Madison quotes on the exterior of the building reads quote Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governor must arm themselves with the power that

knowledge gives. I'm sure glad it fell to Tracy to read that, because I can't get through that sentence without crying. I was thinking this too, because we were discussing that quote yesterday. I did not do that on purpose. It just I lucked out. In June of nineteen ninety four, the Library of Congress launched its website. That too, seems

earlier than my brain can handle. This site, over the years, has become a valuable tool for online research through the National Digital Library Program, which also launched in nineteen ninety four, although work did not officially begin on that program until

nineteen ninety five. The official mission of the program, per the Library of Congress website, is quote assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. This project was only launched after a pilot program had been tested for five years, and it began with a really robust effort to use the best possible means available to accurately reproduce items digitally, ensuring that the results were

functional research materials. So that meant that, in addition to implementing processes for scanning and digitally photographing things like books and journals, and photographs and manuscripts. They also had human beings working to review that material and create records that

would make those newly digitized items findable. This program also worked with K through twelve teachers and librarians to examine the ways that the digitized collections could be used by educators and what gaps existed in the system that were preventing educators and students from really being able to use

digital collections effectively. As a result of this work, the Library of Congress launched a learning portal that offers things like lesson plans, study guides, and context for where digitized primary sources fit into history and culture. A related program, the World Digital Library, launched in two thousand and nine.

For this project, the Library joined forces with UNESCO and other organizations to digitize and share primary sources related to world cultures in a variety of languages, all of which is freely available online. On September fourteenth, twenty sixteen, the first woman and first black Librarian of Congress was sworn in, and that was doctor Carla D. Hayden, who was recently terminated from that position. She was the fourteenth Librarian of Congress.

In her speech at her swearing in, she noted the vast distance between times when a person who looked like her was not allowed to learn to read and write and the moment she was experiencing. Hayden's library background, which is impressive, as we mentioned at the top of the show,

has always been hailed as exemplary by her peers. This inc training as a children's librarian, and she sought during her tenure as head of the nation's library to make its incredible collection accessible to all and to bring history alive to children and adults alike through the collection. In twenty twenty three, she gave an interview to the University of Chicago News in which she said, quote, history is.

four hundred and seventy different languages are represented. These items include books, of course, but also manuscripts and as we've mentioned, photographs, newspapers, et cetera. Twelve thousand items are added to the library

each day, so about two million items each year. In a statement that doctor Hayden gave to the Committee on House Administration two days before she was fired, the librarian noted that in fiscal year twenty twenty four, quote CRS that's at Research Service CRS handled over seventy five thousand congressional requests, published over one thousand new products, and updated

over seventeen hundred existing projects. The Law Library fielded almost one thousand reference requests that year, and quote the library welcomed more than eight hundred eighty million, one hundred thousand visitors to its historic Thomas Jefferson Building, a twenty two percent increase from fiscal twenty twenty three. Ninety eight million unique visitors made use of the library's websites, totaling half

a billion page views. Additionally, doctor Hayden added quote, the National Library Service for the Blind and print Disabled circulated more than twenty two million copies of braille, audio and large print material. Those are all things that were cited in this, but those were really just a handful of the institution's accomplishments under her leadership. I have very strong feelings about the library. I have very strong feelings about Kidties. Do you want to hear the funniest email of all time?

cat eye glasses. I know the hyphen is in the correct spot, so the following misunderstanding is completely my fault. For some reason in my head, when I read the description, I read cat eyeglasses as in eyeglasses for cats. Now, an unfamiliar listener of the podcast may stop and think, why in the world would they do an episode about the inventor of eyeglasses for cats.

and it taught me something about myself. If mobsters came into my place of business trying to intimidate me, I would also completely misread the situation and probably offer them a snack for pet tax. I am attaching a photo of my Australian Labradoudal Cocoa. She is a pretty princess who loves to steal our food, cuddle, and PLoP herself

wherever she pleases. She has a crush on my fiance and always squeezes herself right between us when he is over and demands pets from him, and of course he obliges because she'll look at him with her golden eyes and some kind of enchantment takes over. She is irresistible. Thanks to the podcast, it really is one of a kind and I enjoy listening to it so much, even if sometimes I have a misunderstanding. This is the best

email of read in one hundred years. I love the trust Carrie that you were like, I'm just get a roll with this. They're going to explain this eventually, and we never did. Also, Coco, I get it. I too would fall under her spell in a minute, but that did crack me up. And then I thought about what it would take to try to put glasses on cats, and how much I enjoy, you know, retaining my limbs as unmarred by cat scratches as I possibly can, and how that would not play out at our house. I

have had two cats that would have worn glasses. I'm pretty sure that were just chill about having things put on them, but most of them would not be. But also, how would you test does this look better? Does this look better? I don't know.

so good us just the best. And also I just appreciate your candor in explaining how you got confused, because we have all been there, and not everybody will talk about these moments, but it's important because we all have them. If you would like to write to us and explain something that was very confusing and became comedic, or something else completely.