House Administration Hearing on CO, LOC IT Issues Likely To Discuss Modernization
The House Administration Committee’s Wednesday hearing on IT issues at the Copyright Office and Library of Congress is likely also to continue to raise questions about whether the CO should be granted additional autonomy from the LOC, copyright interests told us. House Administration said in a statement that the hearing will include “an update on the current state of management over the entire Library of Congress information technology systems, as well as how both the Copyright Office and the Library of Congress are working together to meet the demands of today’s digital age.”
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The hearing is to include testimony from Acting Librarian of Congress David Mao, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante and GAO Managing Director-IT Joel Willemssen. Advance testimony wasn't available. Any discussion of CO and LOC IT priorities is likely to center on the extent to which either entity has addressed recommendations in a critical March GAO report, multiple stakeholders told us. The report criticized LOC for not modernizing critical IT systems and backed a significant overhaul of the library’s IT program (see 1503310046). The LOC has since hired Chief Information Officer Bernard Barton and has been working to address other GAO recommendations (see 1509080058).
An industry lobbyist said he expected the CO to use the hearing to tout its finalized 2016-20 strategic plan. The CO’s top strategic goals in the plan, which took effect Tuesday, include building a “robust and flexible technology enterprise that is dedicated to the current and future needs of a modern copyright agency.” The CO’s plan also calls for strengthening its procedures for making technology investments and improving third-party programs’ access to CO data and records. Although it’s clear that LOC is making a “small amount of progress” on improving its IT program, such improvements will go only so far in improving the CO’s IT situation, said Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid.
The CO “is doing what they can given their situation” as a LOC subsidiary, and the strategic plan represents what the office can “move forward on given the current restrictions they face,” Kupferschmid said. “If the CO were to get more autonomy, then presumably their strategic plan would change for the better.” The Copyright Alliance submitted a statement to House Administration backing additional autonomy for the CO on par with the autonomy enjoyed by the Congressional Research Service. That level of autonomy “is what allows CRS to provide Congress with analysis that is authoritative, confidential, objective and nonpartisan, while also maintaining its independence from the Librarian of Congress,” the group said. “By giving the Copyright Office more autonomy and the Library less control over the Office, many of the operational issues previously identified could be resolved.”
The CO “has a lot of work ahead” on improving its IT systems, particularly following the lengthy late summer outage of critical CO systems (see 1509080058), said Electronic Frontier Foundation Director-Copyright Activism Parker Higgins. “I think that downtime shook a lot of things up,” he said. “I expect there will be some discussion about how realistic [the CO’s strategic plan] is” given the current LOC-CO relationship. The CO strategic plan and the direction a new librarian of Congress takes in leading the LOC are likely to be the major factors in the CO’s IT future, Higgins said. Mao is acting librarian while the search continues for a permanent replacement for James Billington, who retired in late September (see 1509250052).
The CO strategic plan may itself help House Administration “begin to address where [the CO] should be or whether it should move at all,” said R Street Innovation Policy Director Mike Godwin. House Administration’s role in the CO modernization debate is somewhat constrained by House Judiciary’s Copyright Act review, particularly since “there’s been some friction between the committees on this,” said an industry lobbyist. CO modernization has received significant attention as part of the House Judiciary’s ongoing Copyright Act review, with stakeholders pushing solutions ranging from additional CO autonomy within the LOC to making the CO an independent agency or placing it within the Patent and Trademark Office (see 1511180063).
The CO strategic plan “really focuses on re-envisioning [the CO] as a service oriented entity without taking a stand on what its relationship to Congress and the executive branch should be,” Godwin said: “In effect, it settles the technical questions about where [the CO] should go but leaves open the larger issues” in that debate. CO modernization inevitably becomes a part of any discussion of CO IT improvements, and the hearing may be an opportunity for additional House members to become educated on the “troubling” LOC-CO relationship, Kupferschmid said. “Ultimately, [the CO is] operating with two hands tied behind their back” because of the CO’s current relationship within the LOC, he said. “It’s an untenable situation that needs to be rectified if we’re going to make necessary improvements.”