Spending Reductions Force Shorter Hours : Library of Congress Cuts Protested

In the stately domed main reading room of the Library of Congress, the normally golden silence is being shattered by cries of “books, not bombs” as protesters wage their campaign against federal budget cutbacks.

The cuts have shaved the library’s evening hours and forced it to close on Sundays for the first time since 1897. According to library surveys, 1,000 people use the reading rooms on Sunday, and 650 people are there at night during the week.

But the world’s largest library says it has no choice but to reduce its hours because of $18.3 million in spending reductions mandated by the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law.

Library’s New Hours

The new hours are 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, instead of 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. One night, Wednesday, the library remains open until 9:30 p.m. On Sunday, the reading rooms are closed. The new hours took effect last Saturday.

In addition to cutting more than 300 people from its staff of 5,000, the library will reduce by $626,000 the funds to purchase books to add to its collection of 81 million items. It also will curtail some efforts to preserve bookbinding, motion pictures and microfilm.

And, as if the spending reductions are not painful enough, the library must hire more security guards to deal with the protests.

In spite of their first arrests this week, the protesters vow to continue their fight.

‘Books, Not Bombs’

“We’re going to keep it going until the hours are reinstated,” Russell Mokhiber, 31, an organizer of the “books, not bombs” campaign, said Friday in an interview. He said he uses the library to research corporate crime for his job with the Corporate Accountability Research Group, a public interest organization.

Mokhiber was among 14 people arrested Thursday night inside the library, along with a law student and a 77-year-old woman, after associate librarian Donald C. Curren officially announced that the library was closed at 5:30 p.m.

“What happened Thursday was not the end but just the beginning for us,” said Mokhiber, whose goal is to spread the word that President Reagan “is emphasizing the military buildup more than the education of future generations and free access to education.”

“I wouldn’t have been anywhere else last night,” added Bill Hirzy, a senior scientist in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Toxic Substances, who was jailed Thursday.

Daniel J. Boorstin, the librarian of Congress, was not available for comment Friday.

Boorstin’s Plea

But several weeks ago, when he appeared before the House Appropriations subcommittee on legislative appropriations, an impassioned Boorstin pleaded with lawmakers to save the library’s funding, warning that the situation “could become tragic for our nation, the Congress and the whole world of learning.”

With large budget cuts, he said, the library will quickly deteriorate. “It has taken two centuries to build this institution,” he said. “It can be disintegrated in a decade and destroyed in two decades.

“Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on their defense would not spend $18 million on their knowledge--and could not even keep their libraries open in the evening,” he said.

In Chicago, Beverly P. Lynch, president of the American Library Assn., issued a statement expressing her organization’s concern about the Library of Congress. She said the cutbacks will affect libraries throughout the nation from services such as cataloguing and classifying books to the distribution of materials for the blind and physically handicapped.