NY Times Looks at Impact of Budget Cuts on Library of Congress

From The New York Times:

Just as military contractors, air traffic controllers and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works — whether famous novels or poems scribbled on napkins — to the collection, preservation and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission.
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The library’s budget for the year has declined to $598.4 million, a 4 percent cut that is likely to slow its digitalization effort and has already caused copyright applications to back up.
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Just when Congress has been contemplating new copyright laws to address technological challenges and serve the public interest, the budget for the Copyright Office has fallen by 8.4 percent since fiscal 2010.
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The Library of Congress spent $1 million in fiscal 2012 to digitize parts of the collections, but that budget will be reduced to $500,000 in the current fiscal year

Read the Full Text Article
Includes comments from Thomas Teper, associate dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Filed under: Libraries, Maps, News, Preservation