Another busy day!
I spent this morning in a hearing at the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, during which Librarian of Congress James Billington and our Chief Operating Officer, Jo Ann Jenkins, testified on the Library’s budget priorities for Fiscal Year 2008, which begins Oct. 1, 2007.
The Librarian discussed requests including funding to cover mandatory pay raises and price increases; a new Logistics Center at Fort Meade, Md., to address “life-safety and environmental conditions” at the Library’s current center in Landover, Md.; implementation of the Digital Talking Books program at the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped; and restoration of a portion of the funds that were rescinded from the Library’s national digital preservation program, known as “NDIIPP”.
The priorities were also stated March 22 before the Senate committee’s counterpart in the House.
If you’d like to learn more about the Library’s budget, after the jump I have included the full text of a story on the March 22 House hearing from the Library’s “Gazette,” which is our snazzy in-house newsletter that normally resides behind a firewall. (If you’re curious why it’s firewalled, then you might ask how many among you are really interested in esoterica such as Metrochek distribution.)
By the way, one of the reasons for the blog is to make some of our in-house content more publicly available. To wit, the budget story follows …
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