Library of Congress Digitization Efforts Humming, Leaders Say

LOC yearly adds 2.5 million online items, admittedly a fraction of the 5 exabytes - 5 billion gigabytes -- of digital information created annually, Billington said. LOC hopes to “seamlessly blend” digital and analog materials, he said. TV didn’t replace films, and in the same vein LOC seeks to “add without subtracting” as it compiles vast libraries of “born-digital” content and digitizes analog materials without scrapping older formats, he said. He called the trend “not so much a shift [to digital] as a great expansion.” Despite “great unevenness” among nations in access to digital data, bright spots include Iran, whose Farsi language is among the most used in blogging, Billington said.

This summer the Copyright Office will launch a service, in development since 2000, that lets copyright applicants track claims’ progress online, said Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters. With its first goal of digitizing post-1978 records achieved, it’s working on pre-1978 records, numbering about 70 million.

Peters said Congress should give her office more leeway to acquire copyrighted works in the most preservable digital formats. Statutorily the office can obtain only the “best” 2 copies of works “as released to the public,” which may be in formats rendered inaccessible as technology changes, she said: “It’s recognized that digital is different” from analog formats. Peters didn’t specify whether she was talking about access problems stemming from DRM.

Deanna Marcum, assoc. librarian-library services, said LOC is gathering all formats for its collection -- blogs, podcasts and others as they emerge -- and adding “authentic, high quality content” to phase out catalog-only records online. An audiovisual center set for completion this year will provide real-time encoding of TV programs and movies for streaming to Internet users, she said.

LOC will add about 4 million digitized items from its historical archives by 2010, said Laura Campbell, assoc. librarian-strategic initiatives. She said LOC is working with Google, Yahoo and 65 other partners to preserve born- digital data, “a huge challenge for us and not us alone,” given Web content’s often transitory nature. Websites average 44-100 days online, according to LOC. The agency’s global legal information network, which lets govt. agencies worldwide review other countries’ laws and post their own, has gone from 20 laws added daily to about 200, said Law Librarian Rubens Medina.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is expanding the accessibility and interactivity of its Congress-focused reports, Dir. Daniel Mulhollan said. Its site had more than 100,000 visits in Jan. and 87% of visitors found what they sought, he said. This summer CRS will launch an online report format that lets readers e-mail CRS analysts from document links and talk to analysts online in real time. Policy podcasts are coming, too, and CRS is releasing “mapping and spatial software to manipulate data” by geographic area so members know how their districts are affected, Mulhollan said.

LOC’s greatest challenges are retaining and retraining staff to work in the digital environment, and recruiting from the private sector, COO Jo Ann Jenkins said. It needs Hill support growing its IT infrastructure and perhaps creating an R&D entity, she said. Discussing LOC corporate partnerships as a means of finding “complementary expertise,” Jenkins assured Ranking Member Wamp (R-Tenn.) those partnerships will be run better than those at the Smithsonian, criticized in recent months for giving Showtime exclusive access to archive materials.