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 begin transforming traditional library services in ways that will meet America's new information needs by building a National On-Line Library. We ask the Congress to support these essential elements required to sustain our future: • Digital Futures Initiative - Create a National On-line Library by providing to begin capturing and preserving materials that exist only in digital form (i.e., "born • Succession Planning - Extend our staff succession program to include the Law Library in addition to the Congressional Research Service (for a third year) and Library Services (for a second year). This is essential to ensure the continuity and quality of core services at a time when unprecedented numbers of staff will be retiring; • Security of Staff and Collections - Permanently fund both the police positions authorized by a fiscal year 1999 emergency supplemental appropriation and itemlevel tracking and inventory collections security controls now made possible through the new Library of Congress Integrated Library System (LCILS); and Preservation and Storage of Collections - Permanently fund a mass deacidification program and the full operation for the first off-site storage module at Fort Meade, Maryland. The Library's budget request for fiscal year 2001 -- $428.1 million in net appropriations and $33.6 million in authority to use receipts -- supports the Library's mission to make its resources available and useful in the 21st century. This is a net increase of 11.4 percent over fiscal 2000. A major part of this increase ($16.6 million) is needed to fund mandatory pay raises (driven largely by the January 2001 pay raise of 3.7 percent) and unavoidable price-level increases; $27.1 million is needed to meet critical, growing workload increases (net of program decreases). The Library is requesting an increase of 192 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions -- from 4,076 to 4,268 FTEs. Even with this increase, the Library's FTEs would still be fewer by 281 FTEs or 6.2 percent lower than in fiscal year 1992 (see attachment 1). The Library has been doing more with less since 1992, but the tidal wave of Internet activity now imposes a level of workload that requires the Library to rebuild a portion of its workforce that has been reduced or funded privately since 1992. The Library will use its Bicentennial in the year 2000 more to leave a legacy for the future than to celebrate our past. We invite the Congress and the nation to join with us in celebrating our 200th birthday, which is being done largely with private funds. At the start of our third century, we ask the Congress to support the increase in resources required to meet the new mission-driven workloads brought on by the Internet age. Funding our fiscal 2001 budget request will enable the Library to sustain its basic, traditional services while comprehensively addressing its inescapable, digital future. We hope the Congress will continue its historic and fruitful investment in the Library as it enters its third century of serving the nation's legislators and their constituents. - The Library of Congress Today The core of the Library is its incomparable collections -- and the specialists who interpret and share them. The Library's 119 million items include almost all languages and media through which knowledge and creativity are preserved and communicated. The Library has more than 27 million items in its print collections, including 5,700 volumes printed before the year 1500; 12 million photographs; 4 million maps, 2 million audio recordings; 800,000 motion pictures, including the earliest movies ever made; 4 million pieces of music; 53 million pages of personal papers and manuscripts, including those of 23 Presidents of the United States as well as hundreds of thousands of scientific and government documents. New treasures are added each year. Notable acquisitions during fiscal year 1999 include: Harry Blackmun Papers and Ruth Bader Ginsberg Papers more than 600,000 new items of these Supreme Court Justices; Marian Carson Collection - 10,000 papers and documents relating to the early history of the U.S.; Bronislava Nijinska Collection - multi-medial collection of the noted ballet choreographer, Carte de Canada et des Etats Unis de l'Amerique - the first map (1778) to recognize the independence of the U.S.; Persian Manuscript Celestial Globe - ca. 1650; The First American Haggadah-published in New York City, 1837; 337 issues of the important Revolutionary American newspaper Claypoole's Daily Advertiser, 1791-1793; the extraordinary J. Arthur Wood, Jr. Collection of Cartoon and Caricature - 40,000 works by more than 3,000 artists; Victor Hammer Archives – the works of one of the great hand-press printers, print makers, and type designers of 5 Ke 20 century; and Politica by Aristotle (Cologne, 1492) -- the earliest printed version of Aristotle's work to become available in the West. Every workday, the Library's staff adds more than 10,000 new items to the colections after organizing and cataloging them and finds ways to share them with the Congress and the nation -- by providing on-line access across the nation, by assisting users in the Library's reading rooms, and by featuring the Library's collections in cultural programs. Major annual services include delivering more than 550,000 congressional research responses and services, processing more than 600,000 copyright claims, and circulating more than 22 million audio and braille books and magazines free to blind and physically handicapped individuals all across America. We annually catalog more than 250,000 books and serials and provide the bibliographic record inexpensively to the Nation's libraries, saving them an estimated $268 million annually. The Library also provides free on-line access, via the Internet, to its automated information files, which contain more than 75 million records -- to Congressional offices, Federal agencies, libraries, and the public. Internet-based systems include major world-wide-web (www) services (e.g, Legislative Information System, THOMAS, LC-web, Global Legal Information Network), the Library of Congress On-line Public Access Catalog (catalog.loc.gov), and various file transfer options. The Library of Congress programs and activities are funded by four salaries and expenses (S&E) appropriations which support congressional services, national library services, copyright administration, library services to blind and physically handicapped |