Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, Testifies Before U.S. Senate and U.S. House Committees

Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, testified before the U.S. House and U.S. Senate this week. Materials and links to video from both hearings are available below.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Dr. Hayden testified before the Subcommittee on Legislative Branch (Committee on Appropriations) about LC’s FY 2020 Budget Request.

Additionally,

• Dr. Mary B, Mazanec, Director of the Congressional Research Service;
• Karyn Temple, Acting U.S. Register of Copyrights, U.S. Copyright Office;

submitted statements to the committee.

These statements include FY 2019 statistics/highlights along with current and future plans/initiatives/goals.

Statements

• Hayden’s Statement
  5 pages; PDF.

From the Dr. Hayden’s Statement:

Last year, the Library welcomed nearly 1.9 million in-person visitors. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) provided custom services to 100 percent of Senate and House member offices and standing committees. More than 450 thousand claims were registered by the U.S. Copyright Office. Nearly 10 million preservation actions were performed on the physical collections; over 20.9 million copies of braille and recorded books and magazines were circulated to more than 470,000 blind and physically handicapped accounts; and the Library responded to over 1 million reference requests from the Congress, the public, and other federal agencies. The Library’s web sites, including loc.gov, congress.gov, copyright.gov, and the CRS site, among others, received 110 million visitors and 503.1 million page views.

[Clip]

The Library of Congress fiscal 2020 budget request is for approximately $803 million, which represents a 6.8 percent increase over the Library’s fiscal 2019 enacted appropriation. This request includes $26 million in mandatory pay and price level increases. The balance of the increase represents critical program investments necessary to fulfill the Library’s role and to move forward on the commitment to be more user centered.

• Mazanec’s Statement
  4 pages; PDF.

From Mazanec’s Statement

The CRS budget request for fiscal 2020 is 121.57 million dollars, a decrease of 4.1 million dollars (or -3.3 percent) from the amount budgeted for fiscal 2019. Almost 85 percent of the requested amount would be dedicated to staff pay and benefits. The requested decrease takes into account a proposed transfer of 8.76 million dollars of appropriated funds from CRS to OCIO to centralize IT operations and personnel within the Library. CRS is requesting no additional funding beyond that which is necessary to cover mandatory pay and price level cost increase

• Temple’s Statement
  8 pages; PDF.

From Temple’s Statement

In fiscal year 2018, the Office received over 540,000 new claims for copyright, registered 560,000 claims covering millions of works, and recorded over 21,000 documents regarding copyright ownership.

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The Office continues to provide key support to the public on copyright issues, handling almost 200,000 public inquiries by phone, email, and in person. And the Office continues to handle the Copyright Act’s mandatory deposit requirement that provides the Library of Congress with an impressive number of published works for its collection, which in fiscal 2018 included more than 735,000 published works worth over $47.5 million

Additionally, the entire hearing can be viewed below.

Wednesday, March 7, 2019

Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration during the Annual Oversight of the Library of Congress hearing.

A video of the hearing is linked below. Prepared statements from Dr. Hayden and Committee Chairman Roy Blount are available.

Blount’s Statement
1 page; PDF.

Hayden’s Statement
11 pages; PDF.

From the Statement:

Since my confirmation, my goal as Librarian has been to expand users’ access to the Library both onsite and online. When it comes to our onsite efforts, my top priority is to help visitors become lifelong users. In early 2018, I presented to Congress an opportunity to enhance the visitor experience of the Thomas Jefferson Building. With an offer from the Library of Congress Madison Council Chairman to lead fundraising for this initiative, we could create a new Youth Center to promote creativity and innovation and grow the next generation of researchers; improve exhibit infrastructure for a Treasures Gallery to highlight the best of our collections; and provide more civics and history education programming to your constituents and others who visit the Thomas Jefferson Building.

I appreciate that Congress committed to a public-private partnership to provide $60M for this project—$40M in appropriated funds to be matched by $20M in private funds raised by the Library.

To date, the Library has received $11M in verbal commitments and is working with a contractor to develop a capital campaign to raise the rest. Congress approved $10M in FY2018, $2M of which was to be used immediately to contract with a professional firm to create a Master Plan from the concepts shared with Congress.

Today, I am delighted to provide you with a first “look in” at the Plan which confirms we can broadly accomplish within the $60M what we envisioned during our concept phase last year.

Direct to Video of Hearing

Filed under: Funding, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Preservation