New Washington Post Editorial: “The Library of Congress is a Surprising Lesson in Digital Government. That’s Good +News for Democracy.”

One of the country’s oldest cultural institutions is now writing the book on how to adapt to a brave new world. Only a few years after being labeled a digital laggard, the Library of Congress is bringing its hundreds of millions of documents’ worth of history to citizens across the country in ever more innovative ways. The success story is one that other government agencies, from the federal level to the local, should consider.

The Library of Congress wasn’t always behind the times. But as information accumulated faster and faster, the institution failed to keep up: Multiple GAO reports noted a failure to hire a permanent chief information officer or institute any coherent strategy to keep pace with 15,000 or so items added to the national collection every day. When Carla Hayden stepped into the role of librarian of Congress in 2016, she was on a mission to modernize, but she was on a rescue mission, too. The rescue mission seems already to have been accomplished, and the modernization is well underway.