King of the Stacks : Librarian of Congress James Billington Targets a World of Information: Get It In, Move It Out

If the gathering of Washington luminaries at the Library of Congress last year had been a book, the cataloguing department would have shelved it under U.S. History, Wars . . . Cold.

The occasion was a dinner honoring the late W. Averell Harriman, American ambassador to Moscow in the 1940s. The timing, a few months after the failed Kremlin coup, could not have been better. So many of Harriman’s colleagues from the crusade against communism were there that it seemed like a victory party. George Kennan, author of the containment theory, showed up. Also in attendance were onetime Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, former National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and retired CIA Director Richard Helms.

“Oh,” said Pamela Harriman to one of her husband’s old friends, “I do wish Averell were here.”

In a way, he was. The venerable diplomat had been dead for five years, but his letters, memos and other writings were stored several floors below in the library’s manuscript division, a collection of well-pawed research treasures. So you could say that Harriman, adviser to Presidents, was still being consulted.

Overseeing this reunion of movers and shakers was Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, a man doing some shaking of his own.

Billington’s announced goal, when he took office in 1987, was to increase the spread of knowledge by modernizing the library’s delivery system. To that end he set out to computerize its huge stores of information and streamline its 5,000-person work force.

“We are trying to accomplish in our time what Thomas Jefferson wanted to do when this place was founded,” he says. “Jefferson believed that in order for an open society to function as it should, you have to have an ever-increasing knowledge base. But to make knowledge available we have to keep modernizing and reviving our institutions. It’s easy for libraries to fall behind and drift into genial decline. I, for one, don’t subscribe to the notion that it will happen to this one.”

The rigorous undertaking has pitted Billington in a 9-to-5 battle with many traditionalists and the library’s bureaucracy. But on the evening cocktail circuit, he is the picture of charm. This particular night, sporting a rumpled tuxedo and an acquisitive smile, he was working the senior party-goers who came to honor Harriman. The room was fairly crawling with potential research material, and Billington wanted to add whatever he could to a monumental collection that already includes a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, a handwritten copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the personal papers of 23 Presidents.

Billington describes himself as a scholar with an obsessive need to track things down, analyze them and make them public, which would seem to suit him perfectly to his job as chief custodian of the nation’s largest repository of knowledge, a sprawling complex of buildings and warehouses filled to the rafters with data in every conceivable form.

He rarely misses a good research opportunity. That was the case when he happened to be attending an international library conference in Moscow in August, 1991, when the coup that killed the Soviet Union broke out. Others were concerned about personal safety, but Billington, a Russian scholar, wanted leaflets. With hard-liners and reformists grinding out literature for their causes, Billington had a chance to do something that most historians only dream about. He sent his staffers into the streets to gather up every flyer, bulletin and manifesto that they could carry. The result was a printed record of three days that changed the world, another unique acquisition for the Library of Congress.

UNLIKE WASHINGTON INSTITUTIONS THAT POUR out endless reams of information, the Library of Congress takes it in--at a mind-boggling rate. From children’s records to road maps, military memoirs to medieval prayer books, the library’s stacks are open to any item deemed useful in advancing “the intellectual and cultural life of America.”

Tall and tweedy with a fondness for framing ideas in historical context, Billington sees the task before him as a continuation of the library’s original mission. “Democracy depends on the constant acquisition of and access to information,” explains the 63-year-old patrician and former Ivy League professor.

Logic dictates that the Library of Congress, like libraries throughout the country, faces an inevitable dilemma. To keep up with the expanding growth of knowledge, the library itself must keep growing. And to do that it not only needs more money, but it also needs more room, something it’s been running out of since the day it first opened its doors 192 years ago with a $5,000 appropriation “for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress and for putting up a suitable apartment for containing them.”

The numbers speak for themselves. The Library of Congress now has an annual budget of more than $322 million and contains nearly 100 million items--in English and other languages--on 532 miles of shelves. The distance from Los Angeles to Reno is shorter. The library’s main function is to collect, catalogue and store every known form of intellectual expression. Books, even impressive specimens such as the Gutenberg Bible, are by no means its only resource. It has 180,000 movies, dating back to the earliest-known motion picture, “Fred Ott’s Sneeze,” made by Thomas Edison in 1893. Among its files of more than 14 million prints and photographs is the famous 1903 picture of the Wright brothers’ first airplane flight. There are 39 million manuscripts, 12 million bound newspapers and technical reports, 12 million records in computer databases, 8 million microforms and 4 million maps. In addition, the library is home to the Congressional Research Service, which does public-policy research for members of Congress, as well as the U.S. Copyright Office, which registered more than 660,000 applications in fiscal 1991.

Yet even as you read these figures, they’re out of date, since the library’s huge inventory increases by one item every five seconds. That’s about 6,000 pieces of information every workday. The bulk of all incoming material is housed in 64.6 acres of floor space in three buildings on Capitol Hill. The rest is sent either to a warehouse in Maryland or an underground storage facility built into the side of a mountain in Pennsylvania.

In a city famous for trails of paper, one of the most extensive on record ends at the Library of Congress. Figuring out where it goes after that is Billington’s biggest challenge. Figuring out where to begin is his second-biggest. As much as one-third of all the library’s collection is uncatalogued. With so much inventory arriving each day and the current staff able to process only a small fraction of it, the problem is obvious. The influx seems beyond control.

“That’s not true. We have it under control,” assures a library spokesman. “We just don’t know where to put it.”

Officially known as “arrearage,” the uncatalogued mass has taken on a life of its own. Billington, whose belief in a well-ordered universe includes a well-ordered library, has promised Congress, his chief economic benefactor and No. 1 customer, that he will have the arrearage problem straightened out by the end of the century.

“Arrearage has become Billington’s magnificent obsession,” says one of the library’s division managers, who believes that the sheer volume of new items will prevent the backlog from ever being significantly reduced.

JAMES HADLEY BILLINGTON WAS BORN IN BRYN MAWR, PA., A SUBURB OF Philadelphia, where he attended local public schools and first developed his taste for scholarship. He traces his love of learning to his father, an insurance broker who never went to college but filled the family house with books. When Billington was a teen-ager, he decided to read Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” in Russian. The project, undertaken with the help of a tutor, took several years to complete, and when he was finished, Billington says, he had not only learned the language, but he’d also absorbed the Russian culture, a subject that still keeps him busy.

In 1946, Billington entered Princeton, where he was a standout goalie on the soccer team and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. “Jim and I went over together on the boat in 1950 and have been friends ever since,” says John Brademas, president emeritus of New York University and a fellow Rhodes scholar. “We were a couple of eager and optimistic young Americans at a time when that’s what Americans were. We would drink tea and sherry in each other’s rooms and make plans for the future. I don’t think there was ever any doubt in anyone’s mind that Jim had the candlepower to do big things.”

Following Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in history, and three years in the Army, Billington joined the faculty at Harvard. He moved on to Princeton in 1962, where he cemented his scholarly reputation in 1966 with “The Icon and the Axe,” a book on Russia that identifies religion and culture, not politics, as the ultimate organizing ingredient in Russian life.

It was Billington’s intellectual anti-Marxism that endeared him to Washington’s conservative Establishment in the 1980s, even as his fascination with all things Russian sometimes left them wondering what made him tick.

He came to his present job, succeeding noted historian Daniel J. Boorstin, after having served 14 years as director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank attached to the Smithsonian Institution. He brought with him a reputation for being able to get things done.

In 1974, his first year at Wilson, he started the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. Two years later, he began the Wilson Quarterly. It was also at the Wilson Center that he learned how to play Washington politics. After the Reagans came to town and relations with the Soviet Union began to thaw, Billington’s services were much in demand at the White House. Nancy Reagan recruited him as a personal adviser, and his knowledge of Russian cultural history was used by the President to spice up summit-conference debates with Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Anthony R. Dolan, former chief speech writer in the Reagan White House who penned the immortal phrase “evil empire” to describe the Soviet Union under the Communists, remembers Billington as an invaluable resource.

Gorbachev and Reagan would goad each other in their speeches, according to Dolan, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The Soviet chairman would pepper his speeches with American adages, and the President would counter with Russian proverbs supplied by Billington.

Billington has four children--the oldest, Susan, is also a Rhodes scholar--and lives in a Virginia suburb with his wife, Marjorie Anne Brennan. But he seems equally at home in his office, where he spends long days planning the library’s future. His style, reports one colleague, is “to work till he drops, recuperate, then start all over again.”

“I don’t sleep that much,” is Billington’s explanation of his work pattern, which he describes simply as “fairly constant.”

PACING THE FLOOR IN HIS OFFICE, WHICH OVERLOOKS THE U.S. CAPITOL across the street, Billington has a great deal on his mind. A lanky, gray-haired man given to turning conversations into lectures, he compares the library’s current problems to the problems of the nation as a whole: the falling rate of literacy, the declining standards in schools, the lack of international competitiveness.

“I came here as a lifelong library user,” he says. “But I soon discovered that the management needs of this institution and the intellectual resources of the people in it were disconnected.”

“One of the things I want to do is get the champagne out of the bottle, and by champagne, I don’t mean just the nearly 100 million items in the collection; I mean what’s in the heads of the people who work here. That entails having a more efficient organizational structure, and maybe even bringing forward a more corporate attitude.”

He may not be a trained librarian, but that, Billington claims, could be to his advantage when it comes to leading the library into the Age of Instant Access. One of his ideas, an ambitious program called American Memory, would make many of the library’s holdings available to high schools and colleges via videodiscs. Another would link the library’s computer databases with a nationwide network of library users.

Anything Billington does is sure to have far-reaching implications. The nation’s largest library is joined by its massive cataloguing operation and other services to thousands of client institutions, and when it changes, the ripple effect doesn’t take long to reach smaller libraries throughout America. The relationship between the Library of Congress and large research libraries is “based on a whole series of interdependencies,” says James Michalko, president of the Research Libraries Group of Mountain View, Calif. “We would be severely handicapped if we were not able to interact with our colleagues at the LC.”

Local libraries, desperate for any help they can get, look to Billington as their savior. If he can succeed in making the high-tech distribution of knowledge a national priority, libraries, now struggling for support, might become as indispensable as public utilities.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that any new help will be costly. Legislation that will be introduced in Congress next session would give the library open-ended permission to charge for services it doesn’t now offer. Carol Henderson, deputy director of the Washington office of the American Library Assn., likes some of Billington’s proposals but wouldn’t want to see every new technological development at the library mean higher costs for local users. “The Library of Congress is a tax-supported institution,” Henderson says. “We don’t want it to act like a business.” But increasingly it does.

Shortly after arriving, Billington declared that the Library of Congress had become an inefficient bureaucracy in serious need of reorganization. He brought in the Arthur Young consulting firm to recommend changes. That would have been the normal thing to do in any large corporation. In Washington, it was a guaranteed prescription for making enemies.

Boorstin, who calls Billington “the perfect man” to have succeeded him as librarian, practiced a management style of lofty goals and benign neglect. Boorstin wrote books on his own time and let the library professionals worry about the administration of the institution. Billington, by contrast, has been thoroughly hands-on.

From his first day on the job, he left no doubts about who was in charge, as he subdivided departments and rearranged old hierarchies, making the library’s employees answerable to nine service units, each of which reported to an overall management team.

The library’s “macro-organizational” chart looked like an aerial view of a craps table, with bars, circles and arrows defining the different services and their relationship to Billington.

“There was too much focus on internal process here and not enough on external service,” he noted in an interview, justifying the need for a shake-up. But changes in any government agency are bound to have political repercussions, and it wasn’t long before people whose jobs were transferred or eliminated started complaining, and in some instances resorted to legal action.

“Billington is a visionary,” says one library staffer who went to court to have his old job restored. “The problem is that he can’t translate his visions into any coherent policy, and he hasn’t surrounded himself with people who can.”

Billington dismisses complaints about his management style as the normal byproduct of bureaucratic conversion and notes that resistance to new programs has subsided in the last year. “Don’t forget this is a government agency,” he says. “Change is a long process that doesn’t happen overnight.”

“I’m very much in favor of what he’s doing,” says W. David Penniman, president of the Council on Library Resources, a Washington-based funding group. “The problem is that he’s trying to turn the Queen Mary around. And you don’t do something like that without stepping on a few toes.”

BILLINGTON DOESN’T CLAIM TO be an organizational genius, but he does have strong opinions on how cultural institutions should function. Library employees, he once told a reporter, are “doing the Lord’s work . . . . I’m just a salesman for the company.”

In that capacity Billington has already had an impact. Last fall, along with a dozen celebrity co-hosts, including Ted Koppel, Gore Vidal and Isaac Stern, he starred in a PBS special about the library. The program showed that the stuffy Library of Congress can be a pretty entertaining place. In one segment, magicians Penn & Teller took the audience on an amusing romp through Harry Houdini’s personal papers. In another, Julia Child commented on the library’s rare recipe collection.

The program was a big success, but was it show business, public information or an ego trip? Billington bristles at the suggestion that he’s using the library for self-promotion, or that he’s gone Hollywood in his effort to drum up support for all his new computerized information projects.

“We’re an enormous throwaway society,” he says, giving his finger tips a brief kiss for emphasis. “My task lies in the area of preservation, to preserve memory but also to make memory relevant to a highly present-minded mentality that you have in this town and in America in general . . . . The problem the library has is that we may be too inward-looking and too preoccupied and don’t have enough sense of projecting ourselves to the outside world.”

Billington says he’d like to change that, maybe even do more television shows. Preparations are under way to start a glossy monthly subscription magazine tentatively called “Civilization,” and there’s talk of staging more-ambitious exhibits, such as a Vatican Library extravaganza scheduled for January. “There is,” he says, “a lot going on.”

Even some of his detractors agree that Billington has been good for the library’s image. “He’s trying to raise the profile, and that’s fine,” says one insider. “Maybe we’ve been a bit too conservative. Billington comes from the Smithsonian, and he wants to Smithsonianize us into a museum of literature. I don’t have any problems with that. It’s his lack of people skills that bothers me.”

Realizing that the library’s congressional funding wouldn’t support the special projects and exhibitions he wants to stage, Billington has embarked on an ambitious program of his own to raise private money.

His primary vehicle for bringing in donations is the James Madison National Council, an association of benefactors who, for a minimum of $10,000 a year, get to attend meetings and have private tours of the library. At the high end of the scale, a $100,000 donation entitles the donor to a three-year membership. For $1 million, a donor is recognized as a Jeffersonian--a lifetime member.

The Madison Council was Billington’s brainchild, and he’s managed to persuade dozens of wealthy patrons to join. Members include communications mogul John Kluge, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, financier Laurance Rockefeller, television personality Phyllis George and Nancy Reagan’s close friend, Betsy Bloomingdale.

“He’s such an exciting man,” Bloomingdale says of Billington. “Whenever he talks about something, you’re glued to every word.”

Kluge was instrumental in helping finance the upcoming exhibit devoted to the treasures of the Vatican Library, and there was early talk that he has persuaded the Pope to attend the opening in 1993, although no one at the Library of Congress will confirm it.

What occupies most of Billington’s time and attention these days is the American Memory program, which eventually will deliver electronic images of photographs, motion pictures, music, manuscripts and books to schools and local libraries. A pilot project currently serves the Andrew Carnegie School in Orangevale, outside Sacramento, and 10 other “recipient sites” throughout the country.

At the same time Billington defends the traditional role of libraries as quiet places to read books and do research, he also believes that they have to change with the times.

“I think it’s important that libraries do the right thing. They could, as some have already done, become video stores and rent out things for people to take home and watch on their television sets. Well, I think that’s a betrayal of the library. American Memory is based on audiovisual sources. But this is the crucial difference: It involves the active mind rather than the passive motions. In order to use it, you’re going to generate questions that can only be answered by books that surround the material. It’s a supplement that uses new technology to reinforce old values. The appeal, as I said, is to the active mind, and that’s the knowledge base of democracy.”

It’s ironic, Billington says, that Americans who use so much information seem to care so little about preserving it. “Too many people are only interested in what’s new. And memory is somebody else’s worry. It’s very discouraging.”

If he had the time, he’d love to elaborate. But he has a meeting to discuss the arrearage problem. . . . A new item every five seconds. Six thousand every workday. All of it having to be catalogued, preserved and remembered.

“It’s a monumental task,” Billington says, heading for his office door, where he stops, adjusts his tie and asks, “If we don’t take up the challenge, who will?”