TERESA A. SMITH, DIRECTOR FOR HUMAN RESOURCES, THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Teresa A. Smith is a Senior Level manager at the Library of Congress where she serves as Director for Human Resources. Ms. Smith is the principal advisor to Library management on human resources and manages a comprehensive human resources program for a staff of 4,300 employees. As Chairperson of the HR21 Steering Committee, Ms. Smith directs a five-year Librarywide effort to ensure that we build, develop, manage, and maintain a flexible work force to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Under Ms. Smith's leadership, the Library issued a Human Resources Strategic Plan to guide the transformation effort and make certain that human resources activities clearly align with agency mission accomplishments. Ms. Smith has twenty-seven years of expertise in federal human resources. She has worked in field, regional, and central office locations and has extensive experience in managing human resources programs, ranging from first-line supervision of personnel staff functions to her current agency-level leadership and advisory role. Immediately prior to assuming her current duties at the Library, Ms. Smith served as Human Resources Director for the Health Care Financing Administration, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). There, she managed a headquarters staff of over 100 employees engaged in providing a full range of human resources services to 4,000 HHS employees in Baltimore and ten regional centers. While at HHS, Ms. Smith streamlined and reengineered human resources services, activities, and programs to deliver more value to the customer. Ms. Smith has a bachelor of arts degree from Indiana University and a master of science degree from Southern Illinois University. She has received certification in facilitation, team building, and organizational development. DIGITAL FUTURES INITIATIVE Mr. TAYLOR. By far the largest increase in your budget is for the digital futures initiative, it is about $21 million and 133 FTEs. Can you explain the project and the components of the proposed expenditure? Dr. BILLINGTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I think I should begin by saying that in this bicentennial year anyone who is a custodian of this institution ought to begin by thanking this committee, you, Mr. Chairman, members of this committee and subcommittee and Congresses past and present for being the single greatest Library patron of all time. No royal family, no Medicis, no one has ever created anything like this oldest federal cultural institution in America which has become the largest repository of knowledge and creativity in human history, and more recently the leading provider of high-quality free historical and educational material in the revolutionary new world of the Internet. It is that which your question addresses. As you have already indicated, the Library brings before you this year a budget that contains probably the single most important request which is derived from the vision and strategy for this new digital era, one that will secure the infrastructure and the personnel to sustain and maximize what is really a quite unique potential that it has to serve the Congress and the Nation. Thanks to the Congress's farseeing support, the Library's pioneering 5-year National Digital Library Program, which finishes this year, has been a stunning success. Just a few weeks ago it capped a long number of awards by winning the prestigious Global Information Infrastructure Award for Education. We have now developed, particularly over this past year with hard work of many parts of the Library, a digital futures plan that will systematically begin building an all together new kind of 21st century library for all Americans wherever they are the Na The Internet is creating a profound and fundamental shift in the way knowledge is stored and communicated, even the way that it is generated. In 1998, the Department of Commerce found that 29 percent of real economic growth in the United States was attributable to information technologies, and that number will go way up when the figures for this past year are computed. Projections show, moreover, that by the year 2003, 80 percent of all business transactions will be conducted over the Internet. Close to one hundred million American households are already connected to the Internet. Further, worldwide exponential growth seems inevitable; not just the workplace, but our daily lives are being altered far more rapidly than our capacity even to understand what the implications are for society. What is already clear is that this new communications era offers the Congress's library extraordinary opportunities to provide new and cost-effective benefits to the Congress and the Nation. Almost all libraries, and an estimated 89 percent of our K through 12 public schools, are now connected to the Internet. Most have direct Internet access into the classroom. Demand continues to grow for the kind of high-quality interesting, even inspirational, material that the Library of Congress Website is almost alone in providing the Nation free of charge through the Internet. The commercial world is preoccupied with marketing and entertainment, which is fine; but we are helping to bridge the gap between information haves and have-nots by providing a vehicle for improving K through 12 education in America. The Library also has an immediate national responsibility to rapidly develop plans and pilots for preserving and making accessible the rising flood of works that are created elsewhere, born digital, and are presently available only in highly-impermanent electronic forms. So our main request, Mr. Chairman, in this budget is for an increase of $21.3 million in order to systematically incorporate digital materials into the Library's historic traditional enduring mission, which is to acquire and preserve useful content, to provide free access to the Congress and the public, and to sustain the backbone of infrastructure that makes access to content possible. We need and are asking for $11 million for the backbone of an electronic service that has exploded from 20,000 electronic transactions a day in 1995 to 4 million a day now. We are asking for $7.6 million for additional domestic and international content and $2.6 million for outreach services to maximize access nationally. Now we realize that this represents a significant increase, but the Library has already severely strained its human and material infrastructure in this past decade to test and determine what these needs really are. These are, I stress, the core needs of any library. They simply must be met for this new type of material if the Library is to provide relevant service in the years ahead and these three different areas are interdependent. There is little point of having content without access and no possibility of sustaining either without an infrastructure, without a backbone. Of course there is no realistic possibility that we can continue our present level of services, let alone maximize our unique and extraordinary service potential for the Nation by further diverting resources from traditional services based on books, periodicals, and the foreseeable future. The amount of print material is increasing worldwide and diversifying in its outlet. We cannot neglect that format. Libraries, Mr. Chairman, are our link in the human chain that connects what happened yesterday with what might take place tomorrow. I ask the committee's support so that the Congress's Library may have the basic material and human resources to sustain the world leadership role that it has established, that Congress has enabled us to establish in the digital age and to be able to modernize our services both to the Congress and to all Americans wherever they are in their local community. Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you. Have you made analysis of the outyear costs for building the digital collections, the cost of distribution and the additional infrastructure that you need for the Library and other institutions? Dr. BILLINGTON. Yes. The Library has completed a very detailed plan for the digital future, and I will refer to General Scott to explain it. I would like to say that program managers from all parts of the Library have put together integrated programs that will enable us to improve service to all of the Congress, to the Nation's libraries and the public in a cost-effective and, we think, coherent manner. I must first of all thank this committee for the support of the Integrated Library System, which you have permitted us to install and which we did under budget and ahead of schedule last year. That is a platform on which the future possibilities we are going to be sketching here are based, and it is something on which we would not be able to contemplate without the special support that you gave us last year. But specifically, in the next 5 years we plan in this program to add 70 additional memory modules to the 5 million items already either on-line or in the pipeline, and international content from 10 other countries, design a program for collecting and preserving digital-only materials in all formats and build a state-of-the-art digital repository, provide navigational tools beginning with geographical mapping services for the Congress to deliver content and services rapidly and in modern forms, and continue on-line educational outreach for teachers and librarians. The end result, we believe, will be an outstanding national asset to meet the growing needs of our citizens for information access and navigation into high-quality content and services. And so, with that general statement, let me pass the microphone to my very distinguished and hard working colleague, General Scott, who is responsible for pulling much of this plan together and for making the vision that we developed into something that is more than just a "vision." Statement of James H. Billington before the Subcommittee on Legislative Appropriations On April 24, 2000, the Library will be 200 years old. It is the oldest Federal cultural institution in the United States and the largest and most inclusive library in human history. In pursuit of its mission to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity, the Library has amassed an unparalleled collection of 119 million items, a superbly knowledgeable staff, and cost-effective networks for gathering in the world's knowledge for the nation's good. As we enter the third millennium and the Library's third century, we ask the Congress to support the Library's leadership role in delivering free electronic information to the nation. Building on the overwhelming success of the Library's five-year pioneering National Digital Library Program, we have developed an overall strategy for the Library's electronic future and an appropriate budget request for fiscal 2001. With Congressional support, our goal is to begin building a new kind of 21st century library for all Americans - the National On-line Library. The Internet is creating a profound, fundamental shift in the way people communicate. An estimated 100 million Americans now use the Internet, which is producing dramatic alterations in the workplace and in daily life. The extent of these changes far outpaces our understanding of their implications. However, it is already clear that the new communications era offers this unique institution extraordinary opportunities to achieve new levels of cost-effective service for the Congress's legislative work and for citizens in every congressional district. The Library is now a proven and dependable Internet site for primary source material on the Congress and on American history as well as for cataloging, copyright information, and much more. Our web site now receives an average of four million electronic transactions every working day. The Library is the 1999 winner of the Global Information Infrastructure Award for Education for the primary source materials we provide about our American heritage. Our award-winning site demonstrates how the Library's services will be increasingly made available to serve national needs in the future. An estimated 90 percent of K-12 public schools are now connected to the Internet, with most schools having direct access in the classroom. The tidal wave of Internet growth coincides with a growing and increasingly insatiable demand for access to high-quality primary materials of real educational value. Congress's library is the world leader in providing such material -and is almost alone in providing quality content both free of charge and with authoritative explanatory material. Congressional vision and support have uniquely positioned its Library to make a major contribution through the Internet towards the nation's educational development and future productivity. Fiscal year 2001 will be the critical one for permanently putting into place the people and support systems required to secure the Library's digital leadership role for the nation. The Library is now ready to build on the experience of the last five years to |