Hiring: The First Librarian of Congress for the Internet Age

I can only think Jason Scott[1] would be the obvious HN sponsored candidate for this position. Imagine the good he would do with the resources.

[1] - http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=User:Jscott

Change the Federal E-Rate guidelines to allow non-library-science master's degree holders to "be librarians", & for the districts that employ "nontraditional" librarians to receive full funding. Through regulatory capture, the American Library Association subsidizes a program of study that has an astonishingly narrow scope, to the exclusion of anything more technical than MS Word & General Reference Center Gold.

Some ideas: train volunteers to do the digitization work; aggressively invest then rent out the digitization infrastructure to industry once backlog is cleared; sponsor competitions inviting open source solutions for LoC IT problems.

Let's see what'll happen to the LOC-supported BIBFRAME.

And whether it or something IFLA-supported FRBR/FRAD/FRSAD/FRBRoo/PRESSoo will win out.

We might even have the answer to that by the time the next Librarian of Congress comes around.

The OP mentions this midway, but this leadershift change is largely happening after a year-long GAO investigation found that the Library of Congress was poorly managed by its leader of 61 years:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/americas...

The report was damaging, but at the time (earlier this spring), Billington had refused to retire. Some of the findings from the report:

> The GAO report is the most damning. Investigators noted that the library could not confidently estimate how much its spends annually on IT costs, although the GAO offered a guess of $120 million, about one-fifth of the library’s total budget.

“They don’t know what they spend, they don’t know what they have,” said Joel C. Willemssen, the report’s author. “The fact they have had five acting CIOs in less than three years, that’s a big concern.”

GAO investigators found the library’s master list of personal computers numbered 18,000 when it actually had fewer than 6,500. The number of systems used by the various units was listed at 30 but another was tallied at 46. “After we raised the discrepancy . . . [the library] provided us with a revised list of 70 systems,” the GAO said.

Part of this will be spun as an "old-people-don't-get-technology" thing...that Billington being 86+ years old meant that he was unable to manage the library's transition to the digital age. To put that in perspective, he was nearly 50-years-old by the time the Apple ][ came out. But I don't think that's the right lesson to take...Older people can learn computers just fine as an intellectual pursuit, it's just that many of them don't have much reason to, especially if they are near retirement or have a job that's not computer-related. It's a matter of incentive; if their job required computers, and they value having a salary, anyone can become adequately acquainted with the computer.

But it just sounds like Billington, among other things, was just a bad/aloof manager, something that can get exacerbated over time if you're at the same job for 10/20/30+ years. If he was also willfully ignorant/uncurious about the digital age, e.g. "Books, radios, computers; they're all the same thing"...then it would seem that the LoC's technological progress would happen in spite of, rather than because of its leader's vision.

But if an 85-year old leader who is still interested in the work even 20 years after he could've retired to a nice pension, and engaged enough to humble himself to learn new technology. Sure, I'll take that any day over a 30-something startup-millionaire. I think institutional memory is very important, and being liked and respected by everyone who controls your budget is not an insignificant asset, especially when it comes to libraries.