Research Libraries Cooperative Cataloging Sites for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (Regional) Sites for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (subregional also includes Guam) Sites for Traveling Exhibits State Centers for the Book American Memory LC Chamber Music Broadcast Series Foreign Acquisitions Program Participants On-Line Computer Access Sites (LC Direct) Academic Research Public Libraries: Exchange of Cataloging X Interlibrary Loans (also includes Guam) Surplus Books Donations (also includes Guam) Global Libraries (includes number of cable network cities) Cataloging Services to the Nation's Libraries-Savings of $360 million Jan 25, 1993 LINKS TO THE WORLD Dr. BILLINGTON. Now, the United States Congress, through its Library, also serves the nation abroad by, for instance, purchasing materials through six overseas offices, not only for the Library of Congress, but also for 86 other major American research libraries, and training scores of officials from 60 developing and newly democratized countries in international copyright law to help protect the intellectual property that accounts for so much of our export trade, and by supporting the new parliaments of former Communist countries, adding in the last year programs of assistance to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to those we already provide to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. That is not, incidentally, on directly appropriated funds. That is money that is given back to the Congress from AID and for which we have been the principal executors. We have highlighted in yellow here three overseas areas where the Library has made a very special difference to the nation during this past year. First, up here, obtaining and mounting an unprecedented exhibit of heretofore top-secret Soviet archival records which, incidentally, have been impounded once they got back to Russia. They will not be shown there now because of the more conservative turn in Russia. They are available not only because they were exhibited here, but because we have captured them, as we will show you in a minute, on electronic format which can be seen in Russia, even though the original documents have been withdrawn from circulation. Mr. FAZIO. The cat's out of the bag. Dr. BILLINGTON. Second, by providing a brand new handbook on Somalia that the Department of Defense used to orient over 500 unit leaders of the U.S. military task force now deployed there and which was rapidly rushed forward to help there, and third, by providing the preservation expertise to help the Indian government save the priceless but previously deteriorating original copy of its own constitution. I could have added Kuwait, to which our Cairo office is basically providing a great deal of the central help for reconstructing their destroyed national library, so it serves the nation as well in its overseas operations. [Link to the world map follows:] ARREARAGE REDUCTION Dr. BILLINGTON. Now, since I last appeared before you, the Library has made major progress in reducing its unprocessed arrearages, progress for which we are deeply indebted particularly to this committee for its leadership and support. We are on target at the end of the second year of our three-year pilot program to reduce our unprocessed collection by 11.3 million items by December of this year. Despite unforeseen personnel problems, our people cut arrearages by 5.7 million items during fiscal 1992, and by an additional 1.5 million items during the first quarter of fiscal 1993. The arrearages now stand at 32.1 million items, a drop of nearly 20 percent since our arrearage reduction program began. This work has made available to researchers and the Congress such impressive materials as the U.S. News and World Report collection of 1.2 million photographic negatives, the papers of prominent Americans like the distinguished Justice Thurgood Marshall, alas just lost to us, whose papers are a particularly valued addition this year. Clare Booth Luce, Reinhold Neibuhr, Byron White, Arthur Rubenstein are some very important people whose papers are now available to the nation for fuller use because of that. The extensive records of organizations like the NAACP and the National Council of Jewish Women, and more than 32,000 rare broadsides pamphlets on American history dating from 1527 are also now entered into the stream of accessible materials. We are doing more than these substantial numbers and this chart reveals because current modernization efforts to support our strategic plan include: Establishing whole book cataloging teams that process Library materials more rapidly, get the through-put time accelerated; installing new bibliographic work stations in place of dumb terminals to improve cataloging productivity, and increasing our use of other libraries' cataloging to avoid duplication of it. Now the fiscal 1994 budget requests additional funds to continue crucial areas of this modernization: $500,000 for updating the Library's incomplete PREMARC file with bibliographic records to be purchased economically from another source rather than continuing the old expensive manual updating process, $500,000 for optical scanning of old serial records to bring them into the bibliographic record, and $350,000 to develop and implement the first phase of a plan to automate the Library's shelf list. [Arrearage Reduction Chart follows:] |