Publishing House Research

Steve Greechie's Interview with Deanna Marcum
Associate Librarian for Library Services
Library of Congress
October second, 2008

SG: This is such a dynamic time for library science. It's even hard to define the discipline. From your point of view, what are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest challenges to the Library of Congress?

DM: The biggest challenge is figuring out what a library is in the 21st century, what a library is in the online environment, how we capitalize on the legacy collections we've accumulated and make them relevant in an entirely new world.

SG: How do you see the LOC doing that in the international library community?

DM: One of the things that distinguishes the Library of Congress from most other national libraries - the Library of Congress and the British Library are the exceptions - is that most national libraries are responsible for collecting the output of their country and preserving that material. We and the British Library make every effort to be comprehensive, universal libraries. We say at the Library of Congress that we are acquiring and preserving and making useful America's creativity and the world's knowledge. When so much of that material is now being created digitally - it doesn't have a paper surrogate at all - we have to find entirely new ways of finding out about that material, acquiring it, and then preserving it in a way that's very different from preserving paper material. In that respect we're like every other national library - except that we're trying to cover a lot more territory.

SG: Technologically, how does the Library of Congress fit into the international library community in the fact of digitization itself?

DM: We're very active in IFLA [The International Federation of Library Associations], and we work collaboratively with our other national library counterparts on digitization projects of many different kinds. There is also a consortium of national libraries to work on digital preservation. So we're a part of almost every large international effort, and in many cases we're taking the lead.

One of the things we're struggling with is what is going to be required to keep digital material available for long periods of time. We know how to keep paper for a hundred years - many times, more than a hundred years - but we don't know how to keep digital information for the long term. And so we're working with all the other national libraries and taking advantage of what each of us has learned to make sure we're all able to perform this really important function.

SG: Is The Library becoming a repository of knowledge but not the documents of knowledge?

DM: Well, the Library of Congress is one of the leading examples of an institution that continues to worry about the artifacts. Partly that's because we have the Copyright Office in this building, and we are very interested in acquiring those American materials in the form in which they were created. The challenge now is how to collect those when one's and zero's are the artifacts.

SG: I expect the Library of Congress will give us a set of answers to that as it been has with subject classification.

DM: Well, we certainly are trying very hard. It's an interesting situation because, with paper, we can look at it and say "Yes, that book is complete. All the pages are there." We know what condition it's in, we know what we have to do to preserve it. With digital materials, we really depend upon technology experts saying "Yes, all the material's there. We will check it a year from now and tell you once again that all the one's and zero's that are supposed to be there are there." Most librarians aren't able to do that. We really rely on technological assistance to validate the authenticity and the persistence of these digital materials.

SG: Should we become more tech-savvy, or should we partner with the technological community?

DM: I think we need to understand enough technology to know we're dealing with good people, but partnerships are absolutely essential. I don't think we're able to do this on our own.

SG: One concern I have is with user-created content. Traditionally, we know where the material comes from, but there's so much material now, and so much of it is created by people in the larger community. How do we deal with the problem of sourcing it?

DM: That's something we talk about so often here. You know Flickr, the photograph site… As an experiment, we put 2,000 or so images from our photographic collection on the Flickr website. And in a very short time more than 8 million user-created tags identifying certain aspects of those photographs had been put on the website. It would take us a very long time to come up with 8 million tags for photographs!

In this environment, we have a lot of people very interested in taking part in identification, classification and description - all the things we've been doing. We're trying to figure out if there's a way to take advantage of people's interest and yet maintain some kind of authoritative, high-quality resource. We take pride in our high level of quality. We make sure that what's on our website is authoritative. We've done the research.

SG: That's such a challenge... So much online material about corporations, for example, is supplied by the corporations themselves, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

DM: Right... they're public relations documents. We're analyzing that now. We're still in the pilot phase. Do we create an editorial group to go through these materials? Are we selectors of material, or are we editors of what other people provide?

SG: This is all so massive. Does the funding that the LOC receives cover all of this? I would imagine that the demands on the LOC are much larger and different than they have been. Has the funding corresponded to your needs?

DM: Well, you know, if any other national library were looking at our budget - and they often do - they are just envious. They think "Wow! Wouldn't it be great to have that much money!" So we don't want to seem greedy, but we have taken on so many different projects that funding is an issue.

We're very fortunate to have Dr. Billington as the Librarian. He's been a very successful advocate and fund-raiser for the Library. He's been able to cultivate a number of people in forming The Madison Council who have been really generous in helping us with new kinds of projects.

Often, after we've tested things with Madison Council funding, we're able to make a case to Congress that this would be something worthy of Congressional support. The American Memory Project is a good example. Private funding started that project, and then there was Congressional funding to continue it.

Interviews