Second, in addition to helping provide the organized information to Congress for making laws, our society needs a universal record of civilization so that in the present we can learn from the past and help more rationally shape the future and more productively shape it. The Library of Congress serves that role and it is a living monument to the remarkable wisdom of the Founding Fathers who saw that access to an ever expanding body of knowledge, by an ever expanding audience of users, would be essential to make democracy a dynamic force on a continental scale in a multi-cultural context. There was great debate among the Founding Fathers whether democracy would ever work beyond the small city-State structures and smaller countries in which it had existed. And one of the keys to its functioning was the extraordinary dedication to a knowledge-based democracy. For democracy to work on a large scale, it has to be knowledge based, and the common pursuit of truth helps keep us from the pursuit of each other, as one authentically enriching and noncompetitive activity in an economy that would otherwise be highly competitive. So a universal record of human civilization is the second reason beyond helping the Congress make laws in a functioning democracy. Third, and related to it, the Library is an efficient way to organize that information for the Nation. With the enormous proliferation of knowledge and the explosion in the information age, having it organized rationally is even more important. The Library, as you know, provides leadership in cataloging that would cost the libraries of the Nation we conservatively estimate about $336 million, if the Library of Congress weren't providing this semi-invisible subsidy to the whole library system. It costs more to catalogue a book than to buy it. This is an enormous contribution that the Library has made in this section, since cataloging is really a backbone of the whole functioning of the public library system in this country. And finally, since 1870 when the copyright system was placed in the Library, the Library has been linked to the creative community. The copyright law is the basis for our unparalleled collections of Americana, unpublished and otherwise unavailable material. The millions of items deposited under the copyright law have enabled us to have a digital library which will get the core of American creativity to the American people in the new electronic age, to provide a repository of the American memory-the creative memory of what has been arguably the most creative people in the world, in terms of the proportion of the population involved in the creative process. And having a central storage of the creative record makes it possible to sustain and renew democracy, and for self-governing people to be constantly correcting themselves and coming up with new creative endeavors. I want to emphasize on the budget that most of the Library's requested budget increase is for mandatory pay and price level increases totalling $22.6 million. Under current law, these increases would be $15.6 million if the President's recommendation is accepted. Steady funding under these inflationary pressures is critical to maintaining existing services and sustaining a successful fund-raising program where private donors understand they are building upon, not replacing the Library's core appropriations. I could talk in more detail about the appropriation, but I think it would be probably more efficient, Mr. Chairman, if I stopped now and answered your questions. [The prepared statement of the Librarian follows:] Statement of James H. Billington before the Subcommittee on Legislative Appropriations 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 1996. The Library of Congress, the world's largest library, has a special mission: to assemble and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity and to make it available and useful to the Congress and the American people. The Library is a unique part of the Legislative Branch of the government. It was founded in 1800 at the time of the Congress' initial location in Washington. It supports the function of protecting intellectual property and it preserves for the nation the record both of that creativity and of human knowledge generally - thereby enabling the U. S. government as a whole to fulfill its obligation under the Constitution to 'promote the progress of sciences and useful arts." We believe that the Library of Congress is also improving its operations. It is delivering far more service now than in 1980 with 11.6 percent fewer full-time equivalent (FTE) positions (see accompanying chart). It is firmly on track with a strategic plan that will, by the end of this decade, both modernize the Library's core operations and enable it to play a leadership role in the rapidly emerging electronic information age. The Library of Congress budget request for fiscal year 1996 totals $378.5 million (including $25.4 million in authority to use receipts), an increase of $30.1 million or 8.6 percent over fiscal 1995. Seventy-five percent, or $22.6 million, of the total increase is required to fund mandatory pay raises and unavoidable price-level increases. (This amount will drop to $15.6 million if the President's recommendation to limit January 1996 pay increases to a total of 2.4 percent is accepted.) The remaining quarter, or $7.5 million, is requested to fund elements essential to the Library's seven-year, two-phase strategic plan (1993-2000) which was presented to the Congress at the end of 1992. The plan gives priority to Congressional services and calls for modernizing existing operations while planning, testing, and then launching the "electronic Library" to serve the Congress and the nation in the 21st century. A brief review of the Library's past and present and its vision for the future is essential for understanding the Library's appropriations. - Early History. The Library of Congress is a living monument to the remarkable wisdom of the Founding Fathers who saw access to an ever-expanding body of knowledge as essential to a dynamic democracy. Its three buildings are named for Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison. With their support, the Congress established the Library in 1800 as it prepared to move to the new capital city of Washington and created the Joint Committee on the Library as the first Joint Committee of the Congress in 1802. Jefferson, in particular, took a keen interest in the new institution. After the British burned the Capitol and the Library during the War of 1812, Congress accepted Jefferson's offer to "recommence" the Library with his own 6,487-volume collection (then the finest in America) at a price of $23,940. It contained volumes on everything from architecture to geography and the sciences. Anticipating the argument that his collection |