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Remarks by James H. Billington
Librarian of Congress

National Press Club, Washington D.C.
April 14, 2000

This Bicentennial of America's oldest federal cultural institution celebrates our distinctive national tradition of free and open access to knowledge and information that has helped make our government accountable, our economy dynamic, and our people creative.

But it occurs at a time when America needs to pose a question for the future that has not yet been seriously addressed, let alone answered. Will the new electronic revolution in communications imaginatively renew or inertially erode our core values and institutions? At stake may well be nothing less than the future health of the world's longest lasting democracy based on a written constitution; and American libraries as a whole, as well as the library of all Americans, the Library of Congress, have a role to play that is perhaps insufficiently understood.

America's greatest theologian of the century that has just ended, Reinhold Niebuhr, said that man's capacity for good makes democracy possible; his capacity for evil makes it indispensable. Long before the holocaust and the gulag magnified man's capacity for evil, our Founding Fathers realized that free men also had a countervailing capacity for good which could be magnified if no one monopolized the knowledge of power and if everyone shared in the power of knowledge.

Libraries were, literally, the incubators of our independence. Both the first meetings of our Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774 and of the U. S. Congress in New York in 1790 took place in libraries. And when the Congress moved to our new capital in Washington, DC, in 1800, it established at the very beginning a Library of Congress under the oversight of the very first joint committee created by the Congress.

The public library system of America is one of the wonders of our country. We have hosted in recent years a growing stream of visitors from the former Communist countries -- more than 2,000 last year and an equal number again this year from Russia alone under the Russian Leadership Program created by Congress with the Library of Congress. They often describe open and free access to knowledge as one of the three key elements in our democracy along with political and economic freedom and the separation of powers.

Already in the late 18th Century, a free press protected by the First Amendment and disseminated by the world's first postal delivery system spread the free information that made our representative republic effective. The rapid development of free public libraries a century later broadened free access to knowledge and helped transform a coastal republic into a dynamic continental democracy. Higher learning became possible for an increasingly diverse population, thanks to new urban libraries created by Andrew Carnegie and the new academic libraries made possible by Congress through the Morrill Act that created a state university system centered on research libraries rather than just catechistic classrooms.

Meanwhile, Congress transformed its own library from a modest original collection of 740 largely legal volumes into the world's largest and most diverse collection of human knowledge -- 119 million items in almost all formats and languages. Congress has proven to be the greatest patron of a library in the history of the world -- creating not only a modern Alexandria for the world's knowledge but also the memory bank for the diverse American creativity contained in the copyright deposit of the United States.

When the magnificent Jefferson Building was opened with capacious public reading rooms in the late 19th Century, our legislative library became easily accessible for any adult who could get to Washington. Now a century later, the Library of Congress is a multi-medial knowledge conglomerate providing free of charge to anyone, anywhere, on-line through the Internet, information about the Congress, our catalog records and some of our most important content. As we approach our 200th birthday on April 24, we are receiving 4 million electronic transactions every working day.

Adding a virtual electronic library to the traditional artifactual library is essential to sustain the original Jeffersonian dream of knowledge shared with more people and used in more ways. A virtual library is also a practical necessity in a world where new knowledge is increasingly being generated and communicated only in digital form. This is the greatest communication revolution since the onset of the printing press, but it raises with new urgency the question T. S. Eliot asked long ago: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge; where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" And we might add now, "Where is the virtue in all of this virtual information?" So far, the Internet seems to be largely amplifying the worst features of television's preoccupation with sex and violence, semi-illiterate chatter, shortened attention spans, and a near-total subservience to commercial marketing.

But there is an enormous new educational potential in the Internet that the Library of Congress has been systematically helping the nation develop in the last decade. We are attempting to extend the basic democratic principle of free access to knowledge embedded in our library tradition into cyberspace through our National Digital Library/American Memory program and summer institutes that we have been holding for teachers from all over America. Unlike television, which basically imposes a bumper car of emotions on passive spectators, the Internet requires a train of thought that activates minds to pursue their own directions through an interactive process.

The Library's web site is already having real impact on American education with 3 million of the most important and interesting primary documents of American history already online and 2 million more in the pipeline. These include Jefferson's manuscript draft of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's two drafts of the Gettysburg Address, Brady's Civil War photographs, the notebooks of Walt Whitman and Alexander Graham Bell, 19th Century baseball cards, and fascinating old maps and forgotten music.

In so doing, we have returned in our Bicentennial year to the seminal vision of the true Founding Father of the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson. He asked to be remembered not for holding the power of the presidency but for unlocking the power of knowledge. By purchasing in 1815 his personal library, then the largest and most diverse in the Western Hemisphere, Congress restarted its library after the original library was burned by the British in 1814.

For our 200th birthday, we are reconstituting and putting on display, for the first time since 1815, almost all of Jefferson's original library, most of which was destroyed by a fire in 1851. And we are extending our National Digital Library into a global digital library through joint projects with major repositories in Russia and Spain, making the new media multi-lingual like Jefferson's original library.

We are helping democratize knowledge by providing public schools and libraries with the high-quality, free and dependable content that they need. On April 24, the Library's actual birthday, in addition to issuing a Library of Congress stamp and the first bi-metallic coin ever issued by the U. S. Mint, the Library will unveil an even more appealing electronic gateway into its collections: a new web site, americaslibrary.gov. We hope it will realize one of the earliest promises of the Internet: to put the Library of Congress at the fingertips of every boy and girl where they live.

With this new site, we hope to put the STORY back in hiSTORY, to make America's story accessible through the human record. Remember the Battle of Ft. Necessity in 1754 during the French and Indian War? I didn't think so. Well, if you go to the "Jump Back in Time" part of our new site on April 24, you can read the 22-year-old George Washington's handwritten letter to his mother describing how, in this disastrous battle, his troops were routed by the French and he personally -- as he puts it -- "luckily escap'd with a wound, tho' I had four Bullets through my Coat, and two Horses shot under me ..."

The Harvard Education Letter recently praised the Library's on-line historical materials for attracting student interest with historical first-hand accounts that made them better able to observe details, think critically, and form their own speculative questions. Our American Memory web site has won many awards -- most recently, the prestigious Global Information Infrastructure Award as the best in education.

We are not digitizing books, but bringing hitherto little used, specially formatted materials like maps and recordings, into the world of books where the fullest answers can be found to questions raised by a picture, cartoon, or old movie clip. The new, multi-medial electronic library is not replacing our traditional print library. The national library of America, like democratic America itself, adds without subtracting. A new immigrant does not evict an old resident, nor does a new technology supplant an older form of expression. Our virtual library does not replace our 28-million-item print collection any more than our published books replace our 53-million-item manuscript collection.

Our electronic outreach is specifically designed to overcome two of the most dangerous divisions in our democracy that have become more acute in the information age.

The first gap lies in the division between rich and poor that is being deepened by the growing distance between information haves and have-nots.

The Commerce Department study, Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide, shows that households earning $75,000 and above are more than 20 times more likely to have access to the Internet than those at the lowest income levels and more than nine times as likely to have a computer at home. African Americans and Hispanics are less connected even in schools than whites are in their own homes; and rural households of all races lag significantly in access.

Libraries are our major bridge across this divide. This same study shows that those with less income or education, particularly the unemployed or retired, rely on libraries or community centers for access to the Internet as their basic educational and employment tool. Almost all libraries are now wired, and most librarians uniquely equipped to provide the human mediation and knowledge navigation needed to make information useful in a given community.

A second, less widely recognized divide is inherent in the new digital universe: the growing separation of the present from the past, the way in which the passing preoccupations of the present are obliterating meaningful links with the past. We originally called our entire digital program American Memory, because it brings old historical documents and the stories of America's past culture and values into the new technology of our present-minded, future-oriented America. The Internet discards previous drafts and older memories in its endless pursuit of the latest information. But most of us crave the narratives that link us to our past -- the stories of our families, our country, our roots. The little-known stories of a wide variety of ordinary Americans during the Depression from the Federal Writers Project have been one of the most visited collections that we have on the web. Stories are enjoyed by everyone and bring people together precisely by their diversity, whereas theories can polarize even homogeneous populations with divisive argument.

Meanwhile, the established, old-fashioned work of this unique national knowledge conglomerate must continue. The world's production of books and other artifacts of human expression continues to increase arithmetically even as digitized information explodes geometrically. Last year, the Library served the creative community through 600,000 copyright registrations. We served 22 million free reading materials to 765,000 blind and physically handicapped Americans, saved the nation's libraries at least a quarter of a billion dollars in cataloging costs, and gave physical preservation treatment to 400,000 items. It is all in a year's work along with serving twenty specialized public reading rooms here in Washington as well as the magnificent main reading room featured on our Bicentennial stamp and logo. You can now bring in your laptop and tap into both networked information and the world's greatest treasure chest of knowledge in hard copy.

And we continue to gather in the world's knowledge from our six overseas offices and from thousands of exchange arrangements with the rest of the world even as we winnow the daily harvest of the 22,000 items that arrive at the Library each day down to the 7,000-10,000 that we keep.

Our core collections spring from and feed into the creativity of the American people -- a process we are specially celebrating this Bicentennial with a program called Local Legacies. Together with the Congress, we are gathering in the documentation of some 1,300 unusual customs, festivals, or traditions, providing a snapshot of American grassroots creativity from every state and territory of the United States. Already, more than three-quarters of the Congressional membership have helped develop projects in their districts attesting to the colorful variety and infinite creativity of ordinary Americans at the community level. A parallel Favorite Poems project, led by the Library's current Poet Laureate, is gathering in more than a thousand records of ordinary Americans from all walks of life all over the country reciting their favorite poems.

These projects draw a creative portrait of America that will be enhanced by our 78 Living Legends. These Legends have contributed significantly to America's cultural, historical, and social heritage. Our curators and specialists cast a very wide net in selecting them, reaching beyond our traditional constituencies of the Congress and the research community.

And we are specially recognizing America's favorite story with our Wizard of Oz exhibition which will open on the Library's 200th birthday, marking the 100th anniversary of its copyright registration in the Library of Congress.

The Congress of the United States has supported this Library and all its activities for 200 years on a bi-partisan basis, recognizing that free and open access to knowledge is now more important than ever for sustaining both practical wisdom in our politics and continuing creativity in our economy. The American people owe a real debt to the Congress for its continuing support of this noble national effort. Its work is quietly performed on Capitol Hill by one of the most skilled, dedicated, and diverse workforces in the world: the truly extraordinary staff of the Library of Congress. All Americans, all seekers for knowledge everywhere, including those of us who manage the Library, owe this staff our eternal thanks. Please join them at our birthday party at 12:00 noon on April 24 on the East Lawn of the Capitol.

The Saturday Night Live Band will be playing. There will be entertainment reflecting the diversity of our popular music collection. It should be as much fun as the new web site we will unveil that day with its slogan, "Log on, play around, learn something." Come to the party and join our wonderful staff in celebrating libraries everywhere. And, if you cannot make it, find some way to hug a librarian somewhere on April 24.