Publishing House Research - Interviews - Dr. James Billington

Steve Greechie's Interview with Dr. James Billington
Librarian of Congress
October 17th, 2008

SG: Sir, there are so many different areas that the library works in. What are your priorities?

JB: Well, my first priority is to make sure that the essential, unchanging historical mission of the Library of Congress is sustained amidst all the changes in the world - to sustain the values of the book culture in a totally new, digital culture. We're rushing head-long into it without much real analytic criticism of what's happening. You have to do new things to preserve old values. America's the only world civilization whose institutions were formed in the age of print, the culture of the book. Without that, it's inconceivable that the kind of democracy that's been established here could have occurred.

We have a combination rare in human history - that is to say, governing institutions, one of whose main purposes is to sustain and support non-governmental creativity. Most governments and libraries basically support what governments want to keep for their own purposes, and that leads to much greater selectivity. Most governments preserve what governments produce, and often selectively push out of the record what previous governments have done, or confiscate what others have done in the society.

I had to do about four or five years of management at the beginning, and since then my priority has been mainly to invade the audio-visual and digital world with things that will get people reading again. There's a moral reason - that is, what's happening is threatening the cultural values. It's shortening the attention span. It's destroying the English language, largely. The basic language of the internet is totally destructive to a sentence. It's a series of emotional outpourings.

The Continental Congress first met physically in a library in 1774 and debated the invention of the United States. This grew out of a mixture of experience and reading - and dialogue that was conducted in a very civilized, disciplined form of English. English is one of the most expansive languages in the world, and yet at the same time it some of the internal disciplines of much more limited languages.

Serving Congress is our first priority. Most people don't realize it but we run the biggest think tank in the world; the Congressional Resource Service works exclusively with Congress. But we're moving more and more into education. Our whole website is basically for K-through-12. The reason is that kids are moving into set patterns much earlier. They're seeing more of the audio-visual - boom boxes, television sets... Computers are creating a different culture. It has all kinds of consequences. We're trying to deal with it through our website, developing interactivity rather than sustaining the passivity of television. It has primary documents with the commentary of professional curators.

When I'm asked what my priority is, I can answer in one French word: survivre - to survive. It doesn't mean just to keep materials here in a museum of the book, which it's in danger of becoming. It means to sustain the kind of energy and focus and tolerance and decency that's achieved only with great difficulty in the normal dynamics of human history.

Preservation is one of the most interesting things we do around here. There's a paradox in preservation: the things that are most perishable are the most recent. There's almost a reverse correlation. The stone steles of China, cuneiform inscriptions of early Sumeria and Central Asia - third millennium BC stuff - that'll live on another couple of millennia. Animal skin, medieval parchment and vellum - things like this - last a hell of a lot longer than paper of any kind, and old paper, papyrus, lasts longer than early modern paper, which lasts a hell of a lot longer than anything since 1850. It's this wood pulp base that disintegrates.

So, surviving the culture means invading where monsters are rising. Shortened attention span, isolating, the illusion get you can get everything you need for human life by looking in the green light of a computer all by yourself - it's destructive.

SG: I can see how your background as a scholar informs your work.

JB: Well, yeah… I see this as a form of service to scholarship just as the idea of getting a union catalogue was an enormous service to scholarship at the end of the 19th century.

We talk about librarians now as knowledge navigators. They have to know something about the subject that they're dealing with - What is the substance of it? What are the ideas? What are the techniques? Then they have to know what is worth saving or recommending to people on the internet. They have to be able to do both - to add without subtracting. Because of the enormous unfiltered quality of what's on the internet, they have to know where the good stuff is. They have to be able to make judgments that you can't possibly make on the basis a machine.

In the scholarship of the future, there'll be a new kind of librarian, a knowledge navigator, who's going to be able to mediate to whatever the community is. They'll play a much bigger role in scholarship because otherwise people will end up using inaccurate, unverified stuff. They'll perpetuate what you're already seeing in non-fiction books - they're written to either claim the credit for something good that happened, or prove that somebody else is responsible for something bad that happened. They don't give you any perspective. They just kick people who are down and over-elevate, with insufferable hubris, the people who are up.

SG: So the screening needs to be a human screening.

JB: Human screening… My favorite image of a library is the only physical library building that survives from classical antiquity - the library building at Ephesus. It has four columns. They're women, and they couldn't figure out what goddesses these were. But they weren't goddesses - they were virtues. And the virtues are - I hope I can remember them now - judgment, character, wisdom and specialized knowledge. Now, that's the best definition of a librarian that I can find. You don't get judgment from just a flood of statistics - raw, unverified information. There's a certain character that is willing to calibrate what's likely, what isn't, and so forth… The dynamic is to move from information to knowledge to wisdom. Wisdom is a practical thing - it's a practical judgment. We need to create a much better understanding of what librarians are, what they're doing and what they have to do.

SG: Does that mean that the industry needs to become more specialized, and librarians need to be trained in more specialized ways?

JB: Well, yes but they need general education as well, because every library is much more inclusive than the narrow problems that a client brings to be answered. It's the test of the library as such, and of the librarian as its master or mistress, to broaden the client's range of vision. And they need specialized knowledge because they need to be the intermediary between the confusing world of information and the particular community they serve.

Now, special libraries are very interesting. Special libraries are for business or for some Chamber of Commerce - or something like that. They have a special audience and they have to mediate, but they have to be not just passive transmitters of information. They have to help guide somebody into a better use of that knowledge than they would make if the library didn't exist. Because there is so much specialized knowledge, there's a need for a parallel world of specialized people who can help guide them through. You do a Google search on anything important and you get hundreds of thousands of entries. You can't tell anything by - you know - the identification, the URL's. And the names from websites don't tell you anything - The Future of Human Thought or something.

SG: And there's so much dependency on Google.

JB: Too much dependency. What you need is people who have judgment and character and enough familiarity with the field to be able to direct people to the right source.

SG: In terms of the international library community… Between digitalization and inter-library loan, how far are we from a universal library - where everything is more or less accessible to everyone?

JB: Well, we're pretty far away from that. We're further away than people are inclined to think. It depends… You might break down the whole copyright protection world. There are a lot of challenges to it, and people who want to challenge it can afford better lawyers than the people who are trying to maintain it.

People better know where to find digitization on demand from somewhere else, but inter-library loan and digitization on demand aren't quite a universal library. I think what people usually mean by a universal library is that everything's going to be digitized. All past books will be digitized, and in the future any book that comes out will also be in digital form. But I don't think everything really should be digitized.

There are a whole bunch of practical arguments why that isn't likely to happen, but there's also a moral argument why it shouldn't happen. If there's anything important about libraries, it's preserving the world's memory and the world's knowledge and the world's creativity for the future. It's a basis of any concept of human progress. We're moving from the analogue world, where the implement itself tells you something without intervention, into a dependence on networks which can be shattered as well as created, and on media which is more perishable than any analogue version. A lot of zero's and one's are useless without the recovery system. Early digitized stuff can't be read now except in a few places in the world. A lot of it is unreadable because of Moore's Law and the planned obsolescence which is the basis of this whole industry.

I'm just amazed at the naiveté of so many people thinking "Well, everything's going to be digitized." I mean, we're digitizing more than probably anybody in the library world, but we don't have the faintest illusion that everything around here should be digitized. How many people want to know about 19th century French dentistry? We have books on the subject.

SG: So your initiative with the National Libraries of Russia and the Library at Alexandria don't presume that as a goal…. to start working toward a universal digitization. What does it seek?

JB: We are simply multiplying what we done in America in the American Memory Program, which is made up of primary documents with authoritative commentary by curators or scholars who do not try to use it as sort of a jumping off point. Cultural, historical documents are there - treaties or letters, diaries, pamphlets, maps, movies, posters - everything. It's historically correct rather than it's politically correct. It's just the story as told by documents and the people who made up the history. It represents countries coming together not to propagandize their country but - or at least not to propagandize the policies of the country - but to propagandize the culture. They can help overcome the digital divide. We're gonna track this next April in Paris, at the world meeting of UNESCO, who more or less endorsed this project. Six or seven other principle partners have created this, national libraries of other big countries - and we hope to have something from the other 192 members of UNESCO online so that everyone knows this is open to everybody.

But that's not a universal library. It is a record for younger people around the world. Most of the places where there's trouble in the world there's a younger generation that's being professionally trained in trouble. They don't have anything to feel proud of - that's one of the reasons they hate us. It's not just that they don't like American policies in the Iraq or wherever they may be, but they also feel that cultural imperialism is even more invasive and terrible - all these soap operas and all the violence and all this sex and stuff on television… all the high commercialism on the internet… It's disorienting to them even as they're fascinated by it. They want the goods - the jeans or the Coca Cola that are being sold - but they have love-hate feelings toward the change it's bringing. The idea is for us as the leaders to claim a little leadership in the moral and cultural sphere - now that we're no longer doing so well [laughing] in the economic sphere.

SG: Finally, Sir, if I could ask one more question. You've talked about material that's not governmental, and material that's not influenced by politics. But the fact is that this a governmental library. Is it ever difficult for you to pursue these goals and be within the government?

JB: Surprisingly, not as difficult as you'd think. I mean… It's difficult getting a big bureaucracy that has both features of a government agency, which it is, and the features of an academic institution, which it is. It's difficult for me technically. I'm the most restricted single member of the US government because I have all the personal restrictions of a member of Congress, which I'm not, and all the restrictions of an Executive Branch agency, which I'm not. The Library is so big and complex, and because it's perceived as doing good things, I have much less political interference in making decisions than the ordinary president of a university does. The university constantly is figuring out how they can get more government grants and the same time keep promoting professors who think the government is, at best, incompetent and, at worst, dreadful. My friends at universities say "Oh, it must be awful to have your first business to serve the Congress!" Well, what do we serve the Congress with? We serve the Congress by objectively mediating. The Congressional Research Service has a cult of objectivity because they can't make the political judgments. They are providing information to the Congress and because the Congress is diverse, they have to play it straight. The support for this on a bipartisan, bicameral basis over the years has been pretty constant. If people don't like what we do, if they want to talk to the head man, they can call up.

SG: That's very encouraging! I'm sure that…

JB: Yeah - people should give Congress credit for sustaining the Library. It is not just a written record of American creativity. Three-fifths of the books are in foreign languages. It's the largest Arabic language library in the world, almost certainly, one of, if not the largest Spanish library. These are enormous collections. And that's very American. This place just keeps adding languages and adding material - but we don't throw away the old. It's a blast being part of this!

Interviews