DR. JAMES BILLINGTON, LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS: Well, it’s really an extraordinary experience, I have to say.

I mean, you learn something new every day. On the elevators, you talk to somebody, and then your regular rounds and covering the kind of universal collection with a broad outreach.

It’s just a very, very fascinating kind of encounter with the world of knowledge and with the American people and the wide diversity of people that you come in contact with when you’re dealing with a library that is as universal in its collections and as multifaceted in its talents, and is connected with anything as original and as important for a knowledge-based democracy as the great library system of the United States.

So, it’s an enormous honor and privilege. And it can also be a lot of fun.

There are, of course, a normal number of problems and headaches with a very large organization. It has the qualities of both a government institution – we’re part of the legislative branch of government – and of an academic institution.

But it’s a mega-library, a kind of multimedia encyclopedia for America and the world, as well as a servant of Congress with our Congressional Research staff. So, it’s a fascinating job.

And then, no matter how long you’ve been here – and a lot of people have been here longer than I have – you really learn something new every day, and you tend to make friends and learn to appreciate all kinds of talents that go into the making and the functioning of a great library.

LAMB: We have something that we don’t normally have on this program, and that’s a live audience. The American Library Association meeting in Washington are sitting here in the Coolidge Auditorium.

What would you say to them, as librarians, that their future is going to be all about here in the next, say, 20, 25 years?

BILLINGTON: Well, I think the future of librarians has never been brighter or more important, although it’s going to be very challenging, because we don’t pay enough attention to libraries as institutions anymore. And we don’t also really understand how they’re functioning.

Libraries, first of all, like America itself, add without subtracting. They bring in new technologies, new sources of information, without throwing away the old.

I mean, you’ll find that libraries have brought in computers and access to the Internet and to the exploding world of knowledge there. But at the same time, they haven’t thrown away the books. They integrate them.

Also, the future is very much one of – we call them ”knowledge navigators,” that is to say, people who can mediate this exploding world of digital information, which has piled on top of a still increasing print universe, increasing audiovisual materials, but can mediate that for the particular communities they serve.

Now, we have to serve the Congress, our government, and have an added increment of our materials that nobody else has, because of our universal collecting in 450-plus languages. We have materials that nobody else will have.

But every library has a distinct community that it serves. And everybody in their clientele is a little overwhelmed by the explosion of digital material, the fact that you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad.

And so, every community needs a human intermediary between the world of knowledge that’s stored in books and the world of information exploding on the Internet, and the particular needs and interests of those communities.

So, I think that the variety of talents needed for the library profession, the quality that we already have, and the way in which libraries, ahead of most institutions, have not seen the computer world as a foe, but as a potential friend and additive factor to the whole business of mediating knowledge and inspiring creativity, and answering questions that each community has, whether it’s a virtual community of a lot of people with common environmental problems of different parts of the world, or a specific community that has its own interests, economic and cultural.

The variety of libraries is very great, and they’ll probably become greater.

But the need for a human intermediary between all this exploding and often confusing and often undependable information that we’ve got, as well as the need to be inspired by the wisdom and the qualities of judgment that are inspired by quiet reading of the stored knowledge of books – all of that’s going to be more important in the future, rather than less.

LAMB: You just came from, I think, a 50th anniversary of your wedding trip around the world, Russia and China. When did you go, and how was the trip? What did you learn?

BILLINGTON: Well, we just got back about 10 days ago from a really extraordinary, interesting trip. We were in Russia, because our pilot program for our National Digital Library, and in a way for our – as we move from just doing American memory materials on the Internet for educational purposes and sharing them free online, to a world digital library – it began with Russia, a project called Meeting of the Frontiers, where we compared the American frontier and the Russian frontier and the common experiences, despite the very different histories and systems we’ve had.

That’s been very popular for school children in both countries, so I went over to see that. And we went also to celebrate the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations with Russia. And we took the great singer, Tom Hampson over, and he did a master class. We always – he’s toured 11 American cities last year, singing songs from our American song collection – songs that were popular in their days, but have been forgotten about since. He sang them for the 200th anniversary.

Our first ambassador was John Quincy Adams. And the Library has been involved with a lot of Russian projects, including this new library that President Putin says he’s going to build. It’s going to be in St. Petersburg. It’s going to be named after Yeltsin, his predecessor. And it’s a very ambitious project.

So, I was asked to give a little advice on that, which I did.

And also, we have a program – it’s not part of the Library, although it was hatched by the Library – called Open World. It’s brought more than 11,000 emerging young leaders from the former Soviet Union for short but intensive stays in different communities, staying in people’s homes.

So, we have a lot of projects, most of which are library-centered, that we were celebrating there. And the concert that Hampson gave was also the 75th anniversary of Spasso House, which was the residence of the American ambassador – a beautiful old house. And he sang for a lot of Russians, and for some visiting Americans.

And so, we had a very intensive and interesting time. They are consolidating some of the programs we have with them.

And then in China, I was …

LAMB: Before you go to China, let me interrupt and ask you about the – you made a comment about 11,000 Russians coming to this country. Explain how that works. And how long has it been going?

BILLINGTON: A program called Open World. It’s modeled on the Marshall Plan. With 1.5 percent of the Marshall Plan was spent bringing in Germans over after the war, so that they could experience first hand. We wouldn’t lecture to them, send people over and give them abstract lectures. But rather, bring them over here.

Let them live in a community for a little while and see what it’s like, and intensively visit people doing real things – judges and courts, city councils operating, and so forth – and libraries for that matter, too, and how the media functions.

An interesting thing, unlike most past exchange programs with Russia, not a single one of those 11,000 has stayed in this country. And they’re very talented people. Average age was 37, half of them women. Something totally new with this young, post-Soviet generation in Russia.

And that program has been extended now to Ukraine and to Russia – I mean, to Georgia – Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and a couple of other countries in the former Soviet Union.

So, it’s been a very successful program. And it began in the Library, but now it has a separate identity within the legislative branch of government. And it’s really – it’s stunningly exciting to see these young people who have grown up after the Communist regime and the Soviet system was in place.

And they’ve come from all 87 political divisions of the Russian Federation and gone to all 50 states of this country, stayed in people’s homes. If it’s a judge, they go to a judge’s home, and so forth. It’s a wonderful program, really.

LAMB: How long do they stay in a home?

BILLINGTON: They don’t stay very long. It’s only about 10 days, because they’re busy people. They have positions.

But for the first time, you begin to get the feeling that something’s happening in Russia from the bottom up and the periphery in.

And, of course, libraries and the public communication and information, the opening of the country – that’s why it’s called Open World program, because it’s designed to promote an open society, and at the same time you’ve got a lot of knowledge-based people here.

Knowledge – one of the great secrets, one of the things they admire, these visitors, is the access to knowledge, the free access to knowledge – not just through the media, but through libraries as being open institutions.

Russians have a pretty good library system. But access to important materials was always a perquisite of power, rather than an entitlement of the people.

And that’s – they think that’s just as important as a division of powers and having political choice in elections as being the secret of democracy. It’s something, I mean, librarians understand and appreciate and exemplify.

But the fact that, you know, books that disagree with each other sit next to one another peacefully in the stacks. People who argue with one another don’t argue usually in the libraries. They sit peacefully next to one another in the reading rooms.

And so, that’s something that is exciting and important. And it’s important for their development. But so is the broader sense of a democracy as lived experience, rather than just another theory.

LAMB: You spent a lot of your life studying Russia and talking about it and writing about it.

Where do you think Russia is today after 17, 18 years of the change? And are you surprised?

BILLINGTON: Well, you know, the glass is half full and half empty.

There have been really huge changes, physically. If you go over there, you’ll see a different country, with all kinds of modern things that they didn’t have before, and with all kinds of freedoms that they didn’t have before.

But in the last couple of years, you’ve seen a regression. There have been a lot of contract murders of journalists. There have been a lot of human rights problems. There has been a lot more stridency in their foreign policy.

But at the same time, what we see through this is that there have been a lot of changes. I mean, Putin, for all his problems and for all his autocratic tendencies, which run the risk of reversing a lot of the positive change, nevertheless, he’s ruling by enacted laws by a legislature – admittedly, it’s a packed one – rather than by just administrative decrees, as Yeltsin was doing, or simply by secret fiat, as the Communist system did.

So, there’s been some progress.

There’s this new generation that we see a lot of people – I think for the first time in their history, things are beginning to happen from the bottom up and the periphery in, rather than just the top down and the Kremlin out.

That part is negative. But on the whole, there are positive forces. And it’s a country that we see in this Meeting of the Frontiers concept, where we compare of the role of the Volga and the Mississippi, the role of the transcontinental railroads, interaction with native peoples, discovery of natural resources creating environmental problems.

There’s a lot of commonalities. And I think the school children in both countries, who use our Web site a lot – our whole Web presence is targeted particularly at K through 12, although everybody can use it.

But this idea of comparing the two countries, not just as two superpowers – of which there’s only one, really, left – but as two big frontier countries on the eastern and western frontier of European civilization, that have both had many common experiences – the role of religious dissenters, for instance. The Mormons populated Utah, the Old Believers moving out when they were persecuted, out into the wastelands of Siberia.

So, it’s an interesting project. And it’s inspired us into a world digital library now, not just America working with Russia, and with six national libraries in Europe, as we’ve been doing, to develop common themes, but rather to replicate our American memory experience; that is, getting primary documents of American history and culture online with just simple explanations – no propaganda, just the kind of documents – so that the story of America can be told through the primary documents.

And primary documents can be used, the teachers are enriching libraries and schools with a teaching device that isn’t preaching device, but just sharing information. And we don’t digitize books mainly. We digitize maps – one of a kind things that we own and that other national libraries do.

So, that began with Russia, but now that’s extended more globally.

LAMB: What’s going to go in that Yeltsin-named library?

BILLINGTON: Well, that’s what they’re trying to determine, because there’s always the problem, is this going to be just some kind of Viking shrine to Russian power? Or is it going to be an open access to the world’s knowledge, as well as their own culture?

And that’s a debate the Russians I assume are having among themselves.

But I think it’s encouraging that it’s going to be in Petersburg, not in Moscow, so that it diversifies it a little bit.

And they seem to want it to be very inclusive. They’re bringing in a lot of things that have previously been scattered.

They have two very good national libraries, with which we’ve been working, and many other libraries. They have, actually, quite a good library system.

Our Center for the Book, which has branches in every state of the union has also been active over there. We have this digital presence.

I think none of this would be possible, if it weren’t more opened up than it ever has been before.

LAMB: So, what was the difference between what you saw in Russia and what you saw in China?

BILLINGTON: Well, China is not quite as far along, to put it mildly.

On the one hand, we were very cordially treated. This is a thing called the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, of which I’m a statutory member.

One is – you know, they’re very anxious. They’re excited that the Olympics are coming up. They kept wanting us to make comments to make sure that the English was right at this program or this sign, and so forth. And we were very, very cordially treated. They really do want more cultural relations.

And I think they – I had very interesting talks, both in Shanghai library and the Beijing library about our – as some of our other associates have had. And, of course, many people are working out – trying to work out collaborative arrangements.

But we hope that (INAUDIBLE) a Chinese memory package along with our American memory package, this world digital library design, to bring the memory of the world’s different cultures to this younger generation worldwide that is increasingly living on the Internet, living on audiovisual images, but doesn’t get much meat, doesn’t get much real educational value. It doesn’t expand their appreciation of other cultures. So that you see the world not as a bunch of competitors or customers only.

But as you celebrate the cultures online – different cultures. America itself has many different cultures. We have populations from all parts of the world now that are American citizens.

And so, UNESCO has been in favor of this. And I wanted to make sure we discussed this.

This was a general tour, talking about the future of cultural relations between – first time that this President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities has ever taken a trip of this size. So, we were discussing – but on the side and in cooperation with this, I was discussing possibilities of a Chinese memory package with the new library at Shanghai and the library of Beijing, and with the minister of culture.

So, those were the major things we were doing.

So, it’s true, we just had our golden wedding anniversary. But this wasn’t a golden wedding anniversary trip. This was a pretty busy working trip.

LAMB: Why do you, at an advanced senior age, keep doing this?

(LAUGHTER)

Why do you keep doing this job? Most people by this time in most people’s lives are retired. You’ve been slugging it out for at least 13 years past retirement.

BILLINGTON: Well, I’ve sort of gotten the Library – not I, but I mean collaboration with a lot of people and a lot of associates – involved in a lot of things, that you hope you can bring to a certain fruition. I don’t want to stay on till everybody’s wondering what this fellow is doing without his drool bucket in the back room, and so forth.

(LAUGHTER)

But, you know, the Lord has favored me with pretty good health and undiminished vitality.

And I have a wonderful, supportive wife. We just re-took our wedding vows three nights ago. I don’t know how many people do that, a golden wedding.

(APPLAUSE)

So, you know, I think – I don’t want to monopolize the position. But there will be a logical time. But, I mean, I – it’s just a fascinating job.

I’m basically a scholar at heart. But I learn something new every day, not just about the world’s knowledge and creativity – which you could spend many lifetimes and not exhaust at the Library of Congress, or at many great libraries – but also about life and about people, because it’s a wonderfully diverse staff we have.

Whenever I go on a trip, I like to stop in on the libraries, and I enjoy meeting the librarians, too. My daughter is working in our West Texas program to build a new library there.

And it’s a fascinating thing that too many people take for granted and not enough people get involved in and supporting throughout this country.

But then, as I say, you bring all these young Russians over and they say, ”Wow! You’ve got open access. You can walk in anywhere and get anything,” and so forth.

So, it’s really a – of course, it’s a great honor, but it’s also a wonderful – it’s a great experience, and a continuing one.

LAMB: Now, I can’t let this pass, because somebody in the audience before you came in whispered in my ear that you were married to a former Miss Delaware. Is that correct?

(LAUGHTER)

BILLINGTON: Well, no, actually, she was a cherry blossom princess, if you want to be precise.

LAMB: I see. OK.

(LAUGHTER)

I guess – if I could – I just wanted to make sure we didn’t leave – Mrs. Billington is in the audience, and she would probably be embarrassed by that. So …

BILLINGTON: No, well, she was working – I was finishing up my Army tour here in Washington, and she was secretary to a senator, a wonderful man named Frear, Senator Frear.

And at our wedding dinner, my brother, who was best man, got up and said, ”Well, now there’s nothing to free her (ph) but Frear himself.”

And my wife – well, anyhow. That was a …

(LAUGHTER)

So, she was working for the senator afterwards and …

LAMB: Go back. You were running the Woodrow Wilson Center before this, 20 years ago.

Go back to – when was the first time somebody suggested to you to be the Librarian of Congress? And what was your reaction?

BILLINGTON: The first time – well, I mean, I didn’t entirely take it seriously. It was sort of like, if you were a Catholic to say, how would you like to be in charge of Saint Peter’s or something? I mean, it’s not the same thing. We’re not a hierarchical structure.

(LAUGHTER)

As every librarian here can tell you, everyone’s – they’re fiercely independent. That’s what makes our country great and keeps us all honest.

But it’s not something you think seriously about. There have only been 13 of us since 1800, when the Library was established.

I mean, I had used the Library of Congress a lot, so I was very familiar with it. And my kind of scholarship is library-centered, because if you’re an intellectual cultural historian, you write books out of other people’s books.

You know, they say, if you steal from one person it’s plagiarism. But if you steal from a lot of people, it’s scholarship.

(LAUGHTER)

So, I read a number of languages and have worked in a lot of …

LAMB: How many?

BILLINGTON: Well, it depends how generously you describe reading. I mean, I read fluently in three languages. But I can read …

LAMB: What are those three?

BILLINGTON: Well, English is one …

LAMB: Good.

(LAUGHTER)

BILLINGTON: … fortunately, so I’m really cheating already. Coming after that, Russian and French are languages that I can read as well as English, really.

But then I can make out, you know, German, Italian, Finnish – a few others, probably.

LAMB: Go back to 20 years ago. Who was the first one to suggest to you that you become the Librarian of Congress? Do you remember?

BILLINGTON: No. I remember very vividly when I was called up by somebody who must have had inside track with the White House, saying, you know, ”We understand you’ve been nominated for this position? What would be the challenge?”

Well, you don’t have time to think about it. And I remember saying, well, bring out the music that’s already there.

And they were a little bit perplexed by that. But that’s what came to my mind, because I had used this enough. I have used a lot of libraries in my life.

I’m very library-intensive. I’ve been on library committees at two universities where I taught. And, of course, the Woodrow Wilson Center basically brings scholars from all over the world to use the Library of Congress, principally, as well as the Archives and other major resources here in Washington.

So, I was very familiar with it, but it occurred to me that the wonders of what’s in this place – John Hope Franklin, to whom we gave our Kluge award this past year, the great historian who worked here for 50 – more than 50 – 60 years, in his last visit here said, you know, this is the eighth wonder of the world.

I mean, it really is astonishing, the amount – and if you stop and think about it, the Congress of the United States has been the greatest single patron of a library in the history of the world. There’s nothing like it, expect maybe the library at Alexandria. But that was just the Mediterranean world. We have these immense collections.

People come over from China to study Chinese minorities that no longer have an independent existence or much memory after the Cultural Revolution.

We re-equipped the libraries of Afghanistan. The Taliban destroyed the historical, legal history of Afghanistan, so they could superimpose Shariah on the whole country.

But we had a copy of – not everything, but a good deal of it, and have re-duplicated it, enabled them to recover their memory.

LAMB: Let me stop. How did you do that? And how big a project was that?

BILLINGTON: Well, that was a pretty big project, because we had an English language version of it. It had to be re-translated, the language of Afghanistan. And then it had to be digitized, and 1,000 copies – hard copies – were made and distributed to all the sections of Afghanistan.

Now, these are the stories you would think that the media would be interested in telling. But some of the good news doesn’t travel very fast these days.

But, I mean, libraries do a lot of wonderful things. But they don’t – people tend to take things for granted.

And that’s ultimately what happened in Alexandria. People don’t realize that.

After the library was burned – which everybody knows about, a dramatic story – the library was reconstituted. Cleopatra got the books from Pergamon, which is where we get the word ”parchment” from, and Alexandria – not the exact same place – but Alexandria became the intellectual center of late classical civilization. There was Jewish as well as Christian participation. It was a major center for gathering in all kinds of strands.

And we don’t really know what happened to those resources. They just vanished.

And my theory is that people just took it for granted and assumed it would always be there. And then suddenly, it wasn’t anymore.

But we are – I mean, there are a lot of great American libraries. And they hold, collectively, the variety. And the way that the American people are serviced is astonishing. But it is sort of taken for granted that it’s always going to be there, so they don’t always get all the support they need.

But it is an amazing resource that still isn’t used as effectively as it could be.

I mean, if you study American history, it’s fascinating. You know, every new settlement – what impressed de Tocqueville – he didn’t think democracy would work. He came over here and he said, wherever (INAUDIBLE) works, it’s because people do things at the community level, they solve them.

And if you look at how those communities were built, even before we were an independent nation, there were a variety of churches, a variety of schools, a variety of economic enterprises. But there was always one library.

And thanks to Andrew Carnegie building all these libraries in major cities, and thanks largely to Justin Morrill – the same senator that brought us the Morrill Act and set up land grant universities, built around a library and a laboratory, rather than just the classroom – we have a library system that’s unique in the world.

The first meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, occurred physically at a library. And the first joint committee of the Congress of the United States was the joint committee on the Library of Congress.

So, libraries, in a sense, pre-existed and helped create America. And they will help sustain it, because every community needs a skilled human intermediary between that big world of knowledge and information out there and the specific needs of their community.

I mean, the Queens branch (INAUDIBLE) of the New York library system does a wonderful job of mediating to the multiethnic population. They are – to their specific needs.

And every community, and many virtual communities that are coming into being, are very much dependent.

When I first got here, there was a study somebody sent me saying – a very ponderous study written by an expensive consultant – saying we need for the future, nodal points of local information distribution.

And they said this plan would only cost $2.5 million. And so I called up somebody who sent me this study. And I said, you know, I just saved the taxpayer $2.5 million.

I mean, these things already exist. They happen to be called libraries.

(LAUGHTER)

And so, the nodal points of information – happy anniversary to the American Society for the Nodal Points of Information Distribution.

No, it’s amazing what we have here. But we tend to take some of our most important things for granted.

And the people – we need a kind of – scholarship is very important. We’ve set up a center for scholars here in the library, and we support in every way we can free library distribution, 22 million items online – all free. Everything we do is a free service, basically.

So, we are very much into this. But the important point is that it won’t always exist, if we don’t use it and we don’t value it.

And incidentally, the digital things we’re doing – and they’re quite considerable, as I’ve already indicated – are designed to get people back into reading. They explore the inherent interactivity that the Internet uses, but doesn’t always – some times, if you just use it the way you use television to blip around on your zapper from one thing to another.

But it is interactive, like reading – unlike most television, which tends to be extremely passive spectatorism. It doesn’t engage the mind very much. You have to develop a train of thought to use the Internet intelligently, just to move from one image to another.

So, it’s a train of thought, rather than a bumper car of emotion, which is what you tend to get, and which a lot of people use the Internet for, as well.

But it can get you back into reading, again, if you have human intermediaries. That’s where librarians come in and teachers come in.

And they have to have traditional knowledge, because what you’ll never get – my predecessor has a wonderful phrase. He says, you can get all the information you want – and you will be able to get in the future really up-to-date – through electronic means.

And he said, but if you want to reach the unimagined question and learn to accept the unwelcome answer, you’ve got to get back into books.

And you’ve got to get back into developing the qualities of judgment, wisdom, imagination that is internally generated and not defined by somebody else’s picture on a screen.

So, that’s the purpose of our digitization. It’s not to – it’s to reinforce libraries, not to compete with them.

Or it’s not to duplicate what television does. Every new technology tends to duplicate its predecessor. The first movies were just plays transposed onto film. And then they realized that you can do something different with the movies and the outdoor (ph).

And we aren’t doing enough that’s different with the Internet that is clearly focused, or the need to stimulate minds to get people – what we have noticed with the Library putting primary documents on television is – I mean, sorry, on the Internet – all free of charge, all easily accessible, putting the primary documents, that people ask questions about them.

At a very early age, even third and fourth grade, Civil War photographs, people – you put them on, and an intercity third and fourth grader will say, who’s fighting who? Who are the good guys? And so, you say, well, both thought they were good guys.

Well, which ones are the Americans? And they say, well, they’re both Americans.

They say, well, whose gang is that?

But the point is, they’re asking questions. They’re their questions. And so, they have a stake in finding answers. And there are no stupid questions. There’s just a failure to raise questions. That will lead to somebody getting motivated to find answers.

And for that, you’ve got to go to people and to books. And that’s what libraries basically are.

So, it’s a device to get people motivated and energized into the creative process themselves, rather than to confront them with boring textbooks that are pablumized down so that everybody – so they don’t give offense to anybody. And as a result, they’re not interesting to anybody.

And kids that are spending more time watching television, and even now increasingly on the Internet before they even get to a classroom, you’re not going to reach them that way unless you can invade this somewhat alien world that’s being misused in many ways, and develop its own inherent potential for interactivity and stimulating kids to be curious, to ask questions.

And the great idea of a world digital library is to get every country, every major culture to put its primary documents of their story of who they are – people love other people’s stories. Stories unite people. Theories divide them.

And so, we think this is a very important thing. And we’re going to be presenting our pilot program for this to the UNESCO meeting in Paris this fall. And we’ve got about 30 different countries expressing interest, in addition to the six national libraries that we’ve already been working with.

So, we’re hopeful that this could develop, not just as an American or a Library of Congress project, but as a way of bringing together the scattered primary documents of cultures that tend to be in different places into one virtual story for each major culture that wants to participate.

LAMB: How much money does the taxpayer spend every year on the Library of Congress?

BILLINGTON: About $600 million.

LAMB: How many people work here?

BILLINGTON: How many people work here? About 4,000, 4,200.

LAMB: Is the budget increasing to the point where you like it? Are there – do you have as much as you need?

(LAUGHTER)

BILLINGTON: Congress has been, on a bipartisan basis, for a very long period of time, very generous.

You always need a little more than you get, particularly if you have an ambitious agenda. There’s always a danger that – something like this takes many years to build up.

Just take the cost of acquisitions, which is the most fundamental thing. We have a margin (ph) of acquisitions. We are up (ph) to six overseas offices that gather in things.

And we have a – which gather things not only for us, but for other research libraries. And if I name the places where they are, you can see the importance – Cairo, Islamabad, Jakarta, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro – places, by and large, where there isn’t a developed book trade.

We collect for every other American library that wants to go and buy books they can’t get otherwise.

So, and we – now, our Islamabad office, you know, discovered in the basis of our normal collection – but see, they sweep through regions. Nairobi does all of East Africa, basically. Islamabad does a lot through Central Asia. Cairo does everything in the Arab world. It’s one of the largest, if not the largest, Arabic collection in the world.

We discovered in the course of normal acquisitions over this extraordinary sweep, the autobiography of Osama bin Laden a few years ago.

The Library of Congress, one of our divisions, the federal research division, produced the only piece of paper that the 9/11 Commission found that outlined a scenario of people getting flight training in this country, hijacking planes and flying into symbolic buildings to destroy them.

That was all from open – that wasn’t from any clandestine materials. They was open, obscure publications in the Arab world. The Osama bin Laden thing was mimeographed.

There are very few secrets in the world. There are very few things that can’t be known. There aren’t enough people asking questions, using libraries to find out. And there isn’t enough – and the Library of Congress does a significant amount of acquisitions, above and beyond – just through the normal library procedures.

This is not some intelligence operation or something. This is just simply collecting, gathering in things of the world’s production.

It’s a very talkative world. We have a blog site now, which has become very active. That’s an important source of knowledge and information. We can’t do all of this.

Digital preservation, we have a program which has suffered a little bit in terms of its – we were grateful that Congress has restored some of what was cut out, not because they wanted to cut the program, but because of categorical decisions about other things besides this program.

But digital preservation is just terribly important, because the average life of a Web site, according to the Commerce Department, is somewhere between 26 and 44 days. And the stuff that survives is not the violent video games and a lot of off-color stuff and other things that – a lot of junk lives on, has a commercial life.

But important data sets that are accumulated by people who think somebody is going to subscribe to this, but American industry is going to want it years from now, or a lot of valuable educational – a lot of things vanish, and it’s very impermanent. And the stuff they’re stored on is impermanent. And the way of decoding the zeros and ones, and the use itself changes a lot.

So, this is a – the most, best preserved things are probably (ph) the oldest. Stone stellas (ph) that you see in China, the cuneiform clay tablets from Sumeria and Central Asia, those things live on.

Medieval animal skin is better than early modern paper. Early modern paper is better than all the paper in the world. Most of the paper of the world is produced since 1850, which is high-acid, wood pulp-based paper, which disintegrates after a while. Just look at an old newspaper up in your attic after a year, if there’s anything left of it, if it doesn’t crumble. And it’s brown and in a brittle state.

So, the acquisition and preservation and making accessible – those are three core things that the Library of Congress has to do for the nation.

And I can’t say – I have to say we’re beautifully and consistently supported by the Congress. But I don’t think anybody realizes – and I don’t think most people in the country realize that, you know, we serve everybody. And as a result, we tend to be taken for granted, like Alexandria was in its late years.

We have a very dedicated bunch of people. We have many less people. We lost nearly a third of our people from the peak years of 1979. We have 640, I believe, less people on board than we had 15 years ago, before we even started our digital thing.

We were essentially superimposing and trying to integrate an entire digital universe on top of the world’s biggest analog collection of nearly 135 million physical analog items. We add more than two million analog items every year.

This is unique in the world. This is, as I say, John Hope Franklin, this great American icon of historians, worked for these many years at the eighth wonder of the world. It’s a continuing wonder to me, as a scholar who has been privileged to head up this institution.

And I just hope we are able to do all that’s needed, as well as – because it’s easy – great institutions like this.

For instance, if you miss one year of a magazine subscription of a magazine that’s been going for 100 years, you aren’t just one hundredth less valuable to everybody. You’re about half as valuable as you are, because everybody – the usage is very heavily on the front end.

And then, if you start discarding things that need to be physically preserved – we’re a throwaway society. Ever since the late 19th century, which – that’s a definition of a democratic society. We produce things that everybody can buy, virtually.

But most people don’t realize that they won’t last very long. And if you’re concerned about the future of America, if you’re concerned about the future of freedom, and if you’re concerned about the creative use of freedom for improving ourselves and making things better, you’ve got to be concerned about these fundamental things.

It’s not very glamorous, but it’s terribly important if our children and grandchildren are going to have the same opportunities we did.

LAMB: Let’s pick somebody that’s out in the middle of the country. They could be a student at a university, or they could just be somebody that’s interested. They’re listening to you talk about the Library of Congress.

What would you advise them if they wanted to become involved in the Library of Congress? Where would you go besides the Web site?

If you come to this building – and by the way, how many buildings are there in Washington?

BILLINGTON: Well, we have three buildings in Washington, right here on Capitol Hill.

I urge them to wait about a year. But if they’re coming, in the meantime, we’ve got some interesting exhibits up. We can give you a tour. You can be inspired by one of the, if not the most, beautiful interior space in America, which is the great hall and the public spaces of the Jefferson Building.

And when the new Capitol Visitors Center opens up, it will have a passageway into the library. So, we expect our visitors – not to use the library, but to just visit and see it – will increase from 1.4 million a year to about 3.5 million a year.

And what they will find when they come, they’ll get a passport to knowledge. And they’ll be able to see a lot of these original documents. We have, you know, the basic papers of the president – most of the papers of most presidents up through – from Washington to Coolidge.

Now, most of all of we have Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, and so forth, is online already. But they can see originals. They can see the first map of the New World that we just got, the Waldseemuller map – its 500th anniversary, 500 years old, the first use of the word America.

You can see Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration, which is much more interesting than the final text, which everybody can see. It’s printed in the middle of advertisements.

But to see the corrections of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and James Madison, initialed on the side, to see the two variant drafts of the Gettysburg address …

LAMB: Is that online?

BILLINGTON: Yes. It’s all online. And you can zoom in. We have compression technology, and so you can zoom in and look to see what your city looked like from an aerial photograph of the 1880s or 1870s, to see what was on your block from an old fire insurance map.

I mean, these are exciting experiences. And so, you can discover all of that.

But then when you come to Washington, particularly when we have this enhanced visitor’s experience, they’re going to get a passport to knowledge. The idea is bringing knowledge into life in this building.

They’re going to see the iconography of this building is amazing. I mean, you’ve got the picture in the ceiling of a young Lincoln, leaning on a dynamo that was – I mean, this was the idea of what America’s contribution to the world was going to be, as seen by the end of the 19th century.

You’ll see pictures of little cupids on the balustrades. And you say, is this an imitation (INAUDIBLE), but it isn’t at all. We’ve got telephone, telegraph, other things that Americans thought they invented, which they don’t know anything about – coupling (ph) with the arms of these little cupids.

You can see football and baseball as it was played in the 1880s and ’90s – a very different game from the games that are played today.

And we’ll have – we’ve got a new exhibition of the invention of the United States. Most people – the creativity of the United States began with the invention. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before, the idea of a representative democracy on a continental scale, without a common religion or common oral history.

We’re the only world civilization created entirely in the age of print. We’re going to celebrate that. We’re going to see, and we’re going to have a whole other exhibit. We’re just bringing – this is getting the music out to the people, bringing out the music that’s already there, and some new collections.

So, they will both get a – this little handheld guide will direct them to see original things. And at the same time, everything they see will be put on their personal Web site, which will be cued in from this little handheld guide.

So, we’re using new technology, but to acquaint people with old things, and to get people interested in the adventure of reading, and a little bit in the spirit of creativity, because they’ll create their own menu, and they’ll have it waiting for them when they get home on their own personal Web site. So, they’ll have an enhanced visitor experience.

But before that, even, if they have a book they wanted, if they have a blind, older relative, they can get free – through their local library from the Library of Congress – we distribute 23 million reading items to the blind and physically handicapped every year.

Blind people read much more than sighted people do. And they get their stuff through the local – if you go to your local library, you get that.

You could get involved in the veterans history project, the biggest oral history project in American history. We have a commission from the Congress to interview every veteran of an American war that’s still alive.

And so, that takes a lot of volunteers, because we don’t have much money for this.

They can get – I mean, it’s a wonderful thing for kids to do, to find a veteran in their neighborhood or their family, and just get them to tell their story, just a little audio clip. It’s not expensive, it’s not complicated, it’s not professional, but it’s important.

And it’s going to make it possible to tell the history of wars in the future very differently from the way. It’s not just what generals said, or this person said, but it’s how people experienced it. It’s a wonderful project.

So, lots of things people can do. And they get on our Web site, loc.gov. That’s all.

We also have one at americaslibrary.gov, which is sort of fun and games for kids, to teach searching as a scavenger hunt, and things like that. We do a few games like that.

LAMB: I have here – it’s kind of rough around the edges, but it’s a library card from the Library of Congress. And I remember getting it several years ago, and it didn’t cost me anything.

Does it cost anything now?

BILLINGTON: No.

LAMB: Who can get a card like this? And what can they do with it?

BILLINGTON: Anybody over 18 – and actually, we’re in the process of lowering the age group, because kids are getting more and more precocious these days.

(LAUGHTER)

So, people (ph) can use any of our 21 free reading rooms, listening rooms, reading rooms. It’s all free. All you have to do is show up, get a picture taken, because it has to be a picture ID. But you don’t have to have certification from anybody.

It’s a free – once you have that card, then you’re free to use any of our reading rooms, some of them with – well, say, movies. I mean, you can’t just sit there and watch movies all day. You have to have some reasonable request that makes (INAUDIBLE).

But basically, these are all free and open. And then our Web site, everything on our Web site is free. Basically, all our services are free.

LAMB: Is every book that’s been written by an American in this library?

BILLINGTON: Well, I can’t say every book, but more than anywhere else, yes.

And we have, of course, basic copyright deposit, which only existed in the Library from 1870. It’s very interesting. Copyright before that was in the executive and judicial branches, but very little was saved.

Congress decided in 1870, to put the copyright – 1870, ’71 – put it in the library – in its library, the Library of Congress. And so, we’ve got two copies of everything copyrighted. Not only books, but all kinds of anything that’s copyrighted – documentary photographs. So, that’s why our music collection is so enormous.

I mean, we’ve got an enormous collection, by far the biggest movie collection in the world, more than 800,000 movie titles. People mostly talk about the reels.

And we’re getting a fantastic audiovisual conservation center that Congress has authorized and helped set up. And we’ve got the biggest private donation ever made to the Library, maybe to any federal institution.

LAMB: Who made it?

BILLINGTON: Packard Humanities Institute, David Packard.

LAMB: Where is this located?

BILLINGTON: This is in Culpepper, Virginia. That will also be a great place to visit, because of the entire audiovisual heritage.

Again, we don’t keep absolutely everything. We keep usually for the life of the copyright, until it expires. In the copyright deposit, we have about 30 million items in copyright deposit.

And by the way, every summer – and this is another way you can get involved in the Library of Congress – we bring in interns, and we get them to do inventory of what was, you know, what was copyrighted in 1883, maybe the first three months. Give us a quick-and-dirty inventory of all this.

Now, last summer, just for instance – we got about 50 of them this summer, and they’re having a blast looking at this stuff.

We always have a little show-and-tell at the end of the summer of what you’ve discovered. They’ve discovered Cole Porter’s first musical, which he copyrighted while he was an undergraduate at Yale. Nobody’s ever seen that score before.

A few years ago – Zora Neale Hurston, the great writer of the Harlem Renaissance, did a wonder mixed media piece called ”Polk County.” Nobody had ever seen that before. Well, we did a reading on stage. It was staged off Broadway and has toured the country since.

I mean, Zora Neale Hurston is a major writer, American writer. And it was kind of mixed media. It was a wonderful thing.

This is an enormous and creative country.

The Library of Congress is basically two things in terms of its collections. It’s the largest collection anywhere of the world’s knowledge in 450 or 460 languages. And it is the closest thing we have to a mint (ph) record of American creativity. Not just books, but movies, music and so forth – areas in which America is creative.

And we’ve only partially used this. And we have to preserve this, physically preserve this stuff – everything since 1850, 1860, practically.

People don’t realize that. They think, when you have a record, it’s permanent. At the same time, the preservation thing is fascinating. Conservation is one of the most fun, interesting things, and one of the most important.

For instance, the Livermore Labs at Berkeley, we’ve been working with them. And now we have a technique for restoring old 78 records. Even if they’re cracked, you can restore the music.

You can eliminate most of the static and restore the original by taking massive photographs of all the ridges, and so forth, around those records. Then you can reconstitute the music. So, we’re constantly doing these things.

There’s so much to do, so much to tell. And it’s really the story of a creative people, who had a knowledge-based democracy, who founded the idea of self-government. And that’s what this exhibit on the invention of America is going to show.

We’ve got drafts of the Articles of the Confederation. We have all these documents. The last appeal of George III to them.

People were apparently afraid then that the French were going to take everything over. There was a sort of paranoid fear of the French. That’s why we fought with the British against the French in what we used to call the French and Indian War.

So, but the point is, we have launched an enormously creative country. It’s not just that we have freedom, but we’ve used it imaginatively, creatively. We’ve created a version of the American Dream, which I like to say is that, whatever the problems of today, if we work hard and if we get more knowledge to more people to use in more ways, tomorrow can always be a little better than yesterday.

We don’t have a perfect system, but we have a system that is constantly capable of improvement. And that’s itself an amazing invention for a country that is as wildly occupied and extended and diverse as the United States is.

So, libraries, I think, are very much the heart of it. We talk about knowledge-based democracy. But they can’t be taken for granted. And they have to be used, and they have to make themselves more usable.

So, the longwinded answer to your question, when people come here, we want them to see that libraries as places are enjoyable, uplifting, are fun. That it isn’t just the network out there, but that libraries as places can be uplifting and fun.

And the iconography of the Jefferson Building, we’re going to have a kind of way of showing that, spotlighting it, doing walk-throughs, having an experience that will take the vision of optimism and hope that was inspired to build this building.

The first century of the Library of Congress was in the Capitol Building itself. It wasn’t really that accessible, although it was always open to the public.

But when they built this building, they built a temple of knowledge, really. And we’re going to restore it to its original vision and make it fun.

But at the same time, we’re going to give people that little gizmo, which they may see as a gizmo. But the whole purpose of it is to get them prepared to see the originals, and then to go back and use the materials at their school, their library or even in their home, that will get them on a life of inquiry.

And the whole Jeffersonian business about the universal dissemination of knowledge – I mean, this is the president, remember, who wanted to be remembered for founding a university, not for being president of the United States.

Well, we scholars shouldn’t be too – former scholars, the present government bureaucrats – we shouldn’t be too dismissive of high office.

But the fact of the matter is that, this profession and these institutions are something that built America before it existed as a country, and that made it into a continental country, as Tocqueville helps remind us, and that will sustain us into a globalized world.

LAMB: I have one last question for you. And I don’t ask this for you, I ask this for everybody watching that would love to have your job.

(LAUGHTER)

You want to tip us off? Do you plan to retire at any point in this process?

(LAUGHTER)

BILLINGTON: I will retire, hopefully, and not be carted out. But I don’t have immediate plans to do so. I think there’s still …

(APPLAUSE)

LAMB: Twenty years, September 17th this year?

BILLINGTON: I think it was the 14th, if I remember correctly.

LAMB: Yes, but who’s arguing? A couple of days, yes.

BILLINGTON: Roughly around there, yes.

LAMB: Thank you, Dr. Billington, very much for joining us.

BILLINGTON: Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)