of providing information. Decisions about IT use in a library are not marginal in any way—they are core business decisions of the institution.

Once the provision of services and budgeting are rationalized, there remain the questions of vision and direction. How shall LC conceive and enact its technological future? The committee believes that LC’s technological future is so intimately bound up in its whole institutional future that it is inappropriate to separate decision making on technology from fundamental policy. Accordingly, in the next section of this report the committee makes recommendations on the structure and role of the highest management in LC. For the moment, it simply emphasizes one need that has become very clear to it—the need for transparent and accountable decision making. The committee rarely found cases of indefensible decisions made about technology or budgets, but it found many cases where suspicion and resentment flourish in an atmosphere of uncollegial decisions taken without full openness and accountability. This approach to decision making has led over time to the erosion of trust and the rise of duplicate systems (“if they can’t do it for us, we’ll do it ourselves”). The committee is not in a position to estimate the costs of this pathology to the system as a whole, but they are real and substantial.

In sum, technology decisions need to be made centrally and openly, with priorities clearly set by the line managers of the Library. Technology professionals should provide expertise and deliver service, not set policy or priorities.

More specifically, the Library of Congress needs an in-house technology group to evaluate Library-wide information and technology needs and provide guidance to the service units. This group must have the resources and talent to understand needs throughout the Library and to anticipate problems. Technical innovation is becoming increasingly information based: that is, more and more about how to create, find, and share information. For example, there is no overall plan to manage and disseminate online content. Various component organizations have pilot projects. The NDLP has an architecture for its own projects—online delivery of digital reproductions. But the NDLP finding aids are digital works in their own right, and that part of NDLP needs to be integrated with the ILS. The Library has not seriously considered a systemwide approach for collecting, archiving, and disseminating online documents.

No one within the Library is explicitly looking at technology and technical trends, envisioning where technology will be 5 years out. No one is bringing that vision to the major service units and content innovators and saying to them, “This is what IT could bring to you in 5 years;

Front Matter (R1-R18)

Executive Summary (1-22)

1. Digital Revolution, Library Evolution (23-49)

2. The Library of Congress: From Jefferson to the Twenty-First Century (50-81)

3. Building Digital Collections (82-104)

4. Preserving a Digital Heritage (105-121)

5. Organizing Intellectual Access to Digital Information: From Cataloging to Metadata (122-143)

6. The Library of Congress and the World, Beyond Its Walls (144-162)

7. Management Issues (163-192)

8. Information Technology Infrastructure (193-213)

Afterword (214-216)

Bibliography (217-240)

Appendix A: Biographies of Committee Members (241-252)

Appendix B: Briefers at Plenary Meetings and Site Visits (253-260)

Appendix C: List of Letters Received (261-261)

Appendix D: Acronyms (262-266)