the organization. Both librarians and IT staff tend to be professionals of long standing with LC; if they have worked elsewhere, it is with other U.S. government agencies, not elsewhere in the library world. Senior people occasionally depart for positions elsewhere in the library profession, but few ever come to LC at that level.¹² One consequence of this has been the growing isolation of the LC community from its natural colleagues nationally and from the technology world in general. The committee believes strongly that the flow of information and ideas from the library and technology sectors into LC needs to be enhanced in a variety of ways.

That the question of appointing a CIO has remained in the air for several years at LC is itself a sign of weakness. Adding a title and an office to the organization chart without carefully considering the underlying organizational principles is a recipe for more confusion, not clarification; remaining undecided for several years about whether to do so or not only compounds the confusion. A new CIO would have to be given a clear mandate for management and direction and would add a layer of management to an organization that few think of as lean. But if a clear mandate were in hand today, it is far from certain that anyone would think a CIO was the answer to LC’s problems.

Given restrictions on salary within the civil service and the allure of the dot-com world, the experience of other federal agencies in recruiting and retaining appropriate CIOs has been mixed at best.¹³ Organizations of similar size in the not-for-profit sector typically pay two-thirds to twice again as much for a CIO as LC can pay, and the private sector pays much more.

Most strikingly, libraries typically do not have chief information officers. They use IT as an instrument for managing their business (as a widget factory would) at the same time as they are mainly in the business

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)