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A look back at a century of controversies and triumphs surrounding the national library's leaders
From its advent in 1907 as the Bulletin of the American Library Association, American Libraries has documented the evolution of the role of Librarian of Congress, and reported on the actions of the six men who have held the post in the last century, as well as the occasional battles surrounding their appointments. Librarians of Congress have been poets, playwrights, journalists, bureaucrats, politicians, historians, and indeed, librarians. They have frequently functioned as cultural ambassadors to the world, and in a sense, as the de facto U.S. Secretary of Culture.
Backgrounds, experience, press releases, official pronouncements, and pontifications aside, the Librarian of Congress's job is complex and difficult: administration of what is quite literally the library of the U.S. Congress, which reviews the library's work and its leadership's performance and oversees its budget, policies, and procedures. A federal agency in the Legislative Branch along with the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Printing Office, the General Accounting Office, and the Architect of the Capitol, LC is also unofficially this country's national library, and among national libraries it is by far the largest; besides its numerous public reading rooms where patrons use the collections and reference services, LC collects comprehensively through the U.S. copyright deposit program as well as gifts, exchanges, and purchases abroad.
Yet the Library of Congress is also much more than a mega-library: LC houses other autonomous or nearly autonomous organizations, including the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Copyright Office, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, the Law Library, and the Federal Research Division. The Library of Congress is, in a sense, a corporation with a number of subsidiaries- one that has an internal board of directors in the form of the Joint Committee on the Library and the legislative Branch Appropriations Committee, to which the Librarian of Congress reports as the head of an agency of the legislative branch. In reality, however, each of the 535 members of Congress has a stake in the library and shares a pride of ownership.
Subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, the president of the United States appoints the Librarian of Congress. The appointment has...