Yesterday the American library world was set ablaze by the news that President Obama intends to tap Dr. Carla Hayden, head of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, a venerable and important institution, to be the 14th Librarian of Congress. Among librarians, the pick is being greeted with almost unanimous praise. Not because she is a highly accomplished African American woman (with the exception of the current acting head, past LoC’s have uniformly been white dudes), nor is it due to the fact that, as the past head of the American Library Association, Hayden played a key role in resisting attempts by Attorney General John Ashcroft, under section 215 of the Patriot Act, to invade the privacy of library users. Those are both, in my mind, good enough reasons. But what’s really exciting librarians is something much simpler: she is a librarian.
Believe it or not, the majority of Librarians of Congress did not come from the profession but were rather academics, poets, journalists, and various other bibliophiles. One of the few exceptions to this rule was L.Q. Mumford, Librarian of Congress from 1954 to 1974. In his honor, one of the large meeting rooms in the Madison Building — the most modern building of the library, built while Mumford was Librarian — is called the Mumford Room. I’ve attended several meetings there, and the spirit of librarianship seems to hang in the air.
While I share my colleague’s generally favorable view of Hayden, and urge Congress to confirm the nomination quickly, some of us did raise our eyebrows just a bit in response to one little comment that she made in her “introduction video”:
People might not realize that the Library of Congress is America’s library. It’s the national library and it holds all the books that have ever been printed in the United States. The Library of Congress is responsible for not only making sure all of these resources are available and taken care of, but also that people realize that they have this treasure right there in Washington, D.C., and it epitomizes what libraries are in every community.
This is in itself a pretty uncontroversial statement, and I certainly don’t disagree with the sentiment. Thought technically speaking, the Library of Congress is not “America’s library” (officially, it is exactly what its name says it is: the library of Congress), it certainly functions as such. And while it does not have exactly the same official mandate as national libraries in other countries (LAC/BAC, the British Library, Bibliotheque national de France, etc.) to be a public library for the entire nation, its reach into every corner of American library life cannot be ignored. Most large libraries use LC’s classification system (while the Dewey Decimal system is better known it tends to become cumbersome in collections that number in the millions) as well as the expansive system of Library of Congress Subject Headings, and for most of the 20th century libraries populated their card catalogs with units produced by LC’s Cataloging Distribution Service. Even as the era of the card catalog came to and end and libraries moved into online systems, first via intranets, then the Internet, the encoding format that LC developed in the 1960s and 70s (“Machine Readable Cataloging” or MARC) became the national standard, and remains so to this day. And since MARC has grown somewhat long in the tooth, and is not particularly well suited for enabling discovery over the semantic Web, LC has been working alongside other libraries in developing a new, linked-data based standard known as BibFrame. And this is just a small window into what LC does, focusing on the technical aspects for the simple reason that that’s the side of librarianship this author is most familiar with.
But to return from my digression: the thing about this quote that cause some of us librarians to go “hmmmm” is the claim that the Library of Congress holds (owns) “every book that’s ever been printed in the United States.” This is, with all due respect to Dr. Hayden, something of a myth. Certainly an oft-repeated and widely believed myth (I know I believed it until I went to library school) but a myth nonetheless. And for a pretty simple reason: not because there is some category of material that LC refuses to collect (though there may be… I’m not sure how complete, for example, their porn collection is), but because the meaning of the word “printed” (or perhaps better, in a nod to the hybrid print-digital age we find ourselves in, “published”) is not well defined or understood, even by people who work with books all the time.
At it’s root the word simply means, “to be made public.” In the library world, the difference between “published” and “unpublished” is usually the difference between whether something goes into a library or an archive. And to the public at large, different (though perhaps not well defined) expectations accompany published and unpublished material. Certainly it’s easy to find examples of published and unpublished material: the paperback you pick up at the airport waiting for a flight has been published, as is the textbook you might use in a college classroom; whereas the letter you wrote home from camp when you were 11 is unpublished, and probably won’t ever be unless you become famous enough that people are interested in your childhood. But there is a surprisingly large gray area, one might say a whole world, of materials that live somewhere between these two poles. For example, is a dissertation “published”? (Librarians for the most part say, no; intellectual property lawyers typically say, yes.) What about a zine? Or a blog post? Are self-published works “published,” and if so, how many copies need to be actually purchased for it to be worth collecting? With the advent of the Internet and profound impact on the world of books and reading, this twilight zone of semi-published material is growing and will continue to grow.
I suspect that this idea that LC has a copy of everything ever published in the US stemmed from the (equally mythical) idea that, in order to obtain a copyright over your work, you must send a copy of it to the US Copyright Office, which is administratively located in the Library of Congress. So we have this misleading notion that, instead of actively collecting material, Library of Congress simply waits for everyone to send them their books when they come off the presses. This is, in fact, not true: in the US (as in most countries) copyright is naturally extended to any original creative work. Sending a copy to LC (or, another urban myth, mailing a copy to yourself and never opening the package) does not grant you copyright, it merely registers it. Which is probably a good idea if you think someone’s going to steal your work because it makes it considerably easier to prove in court. But plenty of things are written and published every day and never have their “natural” copyright registered.
The point here is not really to castigate Hayden for perpetuating a fairly harmless urban myth (and I hope my admiration for her has been sufficiently expressed) but rather just to remind us all that what librarians like to call “the bibliographic universe” is incredibly vast and increasingly complicated. The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, holding approximately 160 million items (exact estimates are impossible because they add something on the order of 10,000 items a day to their collections) and yet it still encompasses only a portion of what’s out there, being written and read and (in some form or another) “published.” Even the mighty Library of Congress is a mote in a larger network of libraries worldwide that encompass the vastness of literary output in this country, not to mention the world. Some people find this notion of a near infinite and ever-expanding bibliographic universe overwhelming, but personally I think it’s pretty neat. There are many ways to define what it means to be human—a “political animal” (Aristotle), a “thinking monkey” (homo sapiens, Linnaeus), even a “killer” (homo necans, Burkhardt)—but for me and many others it is the fact that we can’t stop creating and consuming our own written words. Homo lectit.
Epilogue I wrote this to provide myself (and Daily Kos) with something of a break from the primary wars, so there’s not much in the way of politics here. That said, like all Obama nominees, Dr Hayden probably faces an uphill battle winning approval in the Senate. And as I’ve suggested, Republicans might have reason to hold a grudge against her for standing up against them for reader privacy. For what it’s worth Republicans have been pretty crappy to the Library of Congress—perhaps not intentionally, but everyone I know who works there complains about the inability to do any sort of long term planning due to perpetual budget uncertainty. So keep a weather eye out on this nomination. And as always don’t forget to support your local public library.