TRADITIONAL AND ELECTRONIC SERVICES

Dr. BILLINGTON. The Library currently is going through an historic period. It faces an historic challenge, sustaining its traditional, ongoing services to the Congress and the Nation, while rapidly establishing new services for the onrushing electronic environment, which is so profoundly transforming the way we do business and communicate and above all, communicate knowledge and information.

Between 1992 and 1995, we were able to increase most traditional services despite an 8 percent reduction in FTEs, full-time employees. For instance, we quadrupled in that three-year period the number of cataloging records developed from other sources, and in this last year alone, we continued to reduce our own backlog of uncataloged items by nearly 3 million items. And we have just completed our first production line deacidification of Library books, just to cite a few examples.

At the same time, the Library has become, I think it is not too much to say, Mr. Chairman, a world leader in providing high quality content for the exploding Internet. We are currently processing about a million electronic transactions a day, and we are beginning to make available to schools, to libraries, and to individuals all over the country the core of the documentary record of America's history and culture as it has been slowly accumulated over the years in the Library.

Tomorrow, we will put on line five new major collections. We are now exchanging legal information electronically with 10 countries, and 10 more soon to be added; and we made our first electronic copyright registration last week, using a unique and user-friendly interactive program that allows an applicant to register and deposit a work electronically. Actually it is going to be capable of answering questions directly on line, so not only is the filling out of the form, but the demystifying of the form accomplished simultaneously with this process.

I thought Mr. Chairman, it would be useful to give you a brief overview of some of this new electronic activity within the Library. [Video presentation.]

Dr. BILLINGTON. Included in your package, Mr. Chairman, is a copy of that lottery ticket which you might want to use as a bookmark-I don't think the jackpot has been collected yet as well as a facsimile of what we believe to have been the reading copy of the Gettysburg Address with the first page being on Executive Mansion stationery and the second page on another sheet of paper, obviously revised on the morning that the President went to give it.

Obviously, that kind of downloading is another attractive feature of the electronic library, this electronic access, because one could not only download the full document, but chunks of it to be incorporated into papers that students are writing and so forth.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND MANAGEMENT

To finish up briefly, the Library's 1993-to-2000 strategic plan specified that basic infrastructure and management matters must be addressed and resolved, even as we explore the new technologies you have just seen. The General Accounting Office is now conducting with outside auditors overall financial and management reviews of the Library, and their findings should help further improve the Library's operations.

To ensure rapid corrective action will be forthcoming, GAO recommendations have been incorporated into the management improvement plan that we have ourselves developed and begun to put into effect. We know that problems exist, and in some areas we will be asking the Congress to help us to solve them, but we have excellent leadership in place. I have presented in my longer statement for the record a fiscal 1997 budget request that is based on our strategic priorities as was stated here.

KEY STRATEGIC PRIORITIES

One-third, that is $6.7 million of the 5.8 percent overall increase is to fund key strategic priorities such as collections security, and electronic infrastructure. Two-thirds, that is $13.9 million is simply to fund mandatory pay raises and unavoidable price level increases. The money requested for mandatory pay increases is equivalent to supporting nearly 200 positions and is needed to prevent further cuts in Library services and staff.

Now, I fully appreciate both the budget constraints put on other agencies, the overall constraints that you have reminded us about, and the continued generosity of this committee towards the Library. But I believe that I have an obligation as Librarian of Congress to point out, as I do in more detail in my full statement, how utterly unique an institution it is and how relentlessly inflexible its requirements are for both input and output.

It is what Speaker Gingrich has called in another context, "the seminal knowledge dissemination system on the planet." We are reaching a point where the essential character of this Library will soon be threatened not only by any budget cuts, but even by a continuation of the relatively level budgets we have had for three of the last four years.

Such treatment is, of course, properly considered generous if judged solely in terms of the overall legislative branch budget. But using Congressional Budget Office assumptions about inflation and mandatory pay increases, the Library's budget would have to increase 19 percent by the year 2002, just to maintain current services, since 70 percent of our budget goes to payroll.

EFFECTS OF LEVEL BUDGETS

Continued level budgets would, by the year 2002, as mapped out on this chart, force cuts in the Library staff of more than a thousand positions in addition to the 369 lost between 1992 and 1995. Hence, nominally level budgets would very soon require the elimination of entire service activities for the public and could put the Library on a downhill slide that in the real world would probably be impossible to reverse, and difficult even to slow.

Now, we would continue, Mr. Chairman, no matter what, to fulfill our first priority of service to the Congress, but the Congress would be served by an increasingly mediocre and eventually probably even redundant data center, rather by the extraordinary multimedial encyclopedia and human memory bank that Congress now has at its command. And broad sections of the American pub

lic who are just beginning to discover the Library of Congress electronically would be cut off from the chance to find new creative and productive uses for our vast resources, uses that we cannot even imagine today.

I don't believe that we are yet on that downward slope, Mr. Chairman, but we are getting close and most people will not really know we are there until the slide has actually begun. Almost imperceptibly and without anyone intending it, the Library of Congress could become either a privatized fee-for-service emporium for wealthy clients or something somewhere in between a museum and a mausoleum, a passive public storehouse of America's past, rather than a dynamic catalyst for what America is yet to become.

But I am optimistic about the Library's future, Mr. Chairman, because of the outstanding support that the committee has given the Nation's Library, even in these very difficult budgetary times. It was a far more difficult time when the original Library of Congress was totally destroyed in 1814. It was heroically reconstructed then by the Congress based on Jefferson's own universal library, which started us on this path of inclusiveness and his abidingly wise counsel which he gave then when he said, quote, "There is no subject to which a Member of Congress might not have occasion to refer."

I would be happy to answer your questions.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Billington follows:]

Statement of James H. Billington

The Librarian of Congress

before the Subcommittee on Legislative Appropriations

Committee on Appropriations

U.S. House of Representatives

Fiscal 1997 Budget Request

March 5, 1996

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I appreciate the opportunity to appear here to discuss the Library of

Congress budget request for fiscal year 1997.

The Library of Congress is the world's largest and most varied treasure

chest of information, knowledge and creativity. It is a resource of incalculable value to the United States in the information age.

These simple, stunning facts put an unusually heavy burden of responsibility on those of us who administer this unique institution and on the Congress which created it, governs it, and determines its level of support.

The Library is fundamentally different from any other institution in the legislative branch of government. It directly serves not only the Congress, but the entire nation with the most important commodity of our time: knowledge and information. Our national health depends: (1) on our collective economic productivity, which is increasingly based on information; and (2) on our creative use of individual freedom, which increasingly requires more life-long learning by more people.

The Library of Congress has developed over 196 years massive collections, institutional networks and a knowledgeable staff that give it a unique potential unmatched by any other institution for making almost any kind of knowledge and information accessible to almost anyone almost anywhere. Thus, evaluation of its budget requires not only understanding what the Library is doing now, but also realizing that decisions made now will increasingly affect what the Library will or will not be able to do in the future. Most major functions currently exercised or under consideration by the Library are unlikely to be taken up by any other foreseeable institution if they are not performed by the Library of Congress.

The Library's central institutional value is service. Its mission is to sustain its universal collection and to make it useful to the Congress and the nation. Its key priorities are, first, service to the Congress for its current needs; second, sustaining a universal collection for the present and future needs of the nation; and third, making its collections and staff ever more useful to more people in libraries, schools, businesses and homes throughout the country.

The Library of Congress budget for fiscal year 1997 supports its mission and priorities and requests a total appropriation of $373 million (including $28.3 million in authority to use receipts), an increase of $20.6 million or 5.8 percent over fiscal 1996. Two-thirds, or $13.9 million, of the total increase is required simply to fund mandatory pay raises and unavoidable price-level increases. The remaining