S. HRG. 102-475 TESTIMONY ON LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SECURITY PROPOSALS AND POLICIES HEARING BEFORE THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE LIBRARY ONE HUNDRED THIRD CONGRESS FIRST SESSION TUESDAY JUNE 15, 1993 Printed for the use of the Joint Committee on the Library 8 PREPARED STAtement of James H. Billington, the Librarian of CongRESS I appreciate the opportunity to testify before the Joint Committee on the Library today because the subject of the hearing-collections security-is central to the task we carry out as keepers of the nation's memory and so critical to the Library's ability to fulfill its mission. With the steady support of the Congress, over the past 2 centuries we have amassed the greatest collections in the world, and we are keenly aware of our responsibility to preserve and protect them. To say that the collections of the Library of Congress are without peer is an understatement that does little to describe what they contain. We recently celebrated the acquisition of the Library's 100 millionth item, one of a collection of watercolor paintings, drawings, and prints by the 19th century artist John Rubens Smith. It joined other items including 4 million maps, 40,000,000 manuscripts, and 12,000,000 musical items. This is just the beginning of a long list. There are also about 20 million bound volumes-books and serials that constitute one-fifth of the total collections. As a library of record, when appropriate we try to preserve the item in its original form. These vast holdings belong to the nation. To be certain they will be available for future generations of citizens and scholars, we must protect them today. The collections are served to readers through the Library's 22 reading rooms and are retrieved from hundreds of miles of closed stacks. Most people do not realize that between 70 and 80 percent of the items in our collections have always been in closed stacks which have never been available to the public or to Library staff who do not work in that particular area. Stack passes have never been available, for example; in such collections as maps, manuscripts, motion pictures, music, sound recordings, and other special collections. For decades, the general book collections were treated differently from the special collections. We made exceptions to our closed stack policy when we found that the interests of the Library and the researcher were best served by issuance of a stack pass that gave access to the book collections. Library staff were also given unlimited access to the book stacks until last year. However, the Library of Congress was more vulnerable than anyone was willing to admit. Society had changed. We gradually became aware of increased threats to collections security, even as other American institutions faced increased threats to people and property. In 1978, we began an inventory of the general book collections. As it progressed, Library management discovered that about 300,000 volumes could not be accounted for. Later studies indicated we were suffering both damage and losses. While the Library had a long proud tradition of accessibility to its collections, it became increasingly clear that permitting direct access had inflicted a terrible hidden cost. We had to make greater efforts to safeguard the general collections. It was a complicated task. Even as we examined the overall problem, we decided to get started on a registration effort. In June 1991, to coincide with the reopening of the restored Main Reading Room in the Jefferson Building, we began a Library-wide reader registration program. Readers are asked to present photo identification, and those who plan to use the collections for more than one day obtain a registration card after completing an application form with such information as name, address, affiliation, and research needs. The process takes about 3 minutes and is widely accepted. Other major research libraries were reporting growing problems with theft. At the New York Public Library the stacks had long been closed to all but designated staff. At the Library of Congress, closing the stacks was not a popular idea, but internal management and staff discussions were continuing. We were moving toward curtailing access to the public in 1991-92 when a number of incidents occurred that made it imperative that the stacks be closed immediately to all but designated staff. First, between May 1991 and March 1992, 4 people were caught and arrested at the Library for theft of our materials. The thieves were industrious: one had used numerous aliases on call slips to mask his identity and had special pockets built into his coat to hide materials; another used a corner of one of our reading rooms to rip maps out of old congressional documents, then hid them in his clothing. The more we learned about the variety of methods used to pillage and mutilate the collections, the more alarmed we became. We also realized that we could not predict who the thieves might be. The persons arrested seemed to be quite respectable researchers before they were caught: indeed, one was a government attorney; another, a physician in the suburbs. We began to examine our illustrated books. So far we have found that approximately 500 titles are mutilated, many of them multi-volume sets. We believe that sophisticated thieves had targeted our collections of illustrated books because of |