Nancy Scola is a reporter covering technology for Politico Pro.

James Billington, the current Librarian of Congress, has held the office for nearly three decades, a longer tenure than most Supreme Court justices. Since 1987, the Reagan appointee has overseen a vast institution that acts as the research arm of Congress, sets many of the nation’s copyright rules and maintains a collection of 160 million works ranging from rare Civil War photographs to an exquisite 15th-century Gutenberg Bible, locked behind glass in the Library’s Great Hall.

But under his leadership, the Library of Congress has earned a reputation as a technology laggard with a spotty record on everything from digitizing records to improving archaic IT systems. And so, as the 86-year-old Billington steps down this week, tech advocates are pushing for an Internet-savvy replacement—seeing a rare chance to modernize a cultural and policy-making institution that’s fallen far behind in the digital age.


“Moldering piles at risk of being bypassed by history” is how Daniel Schuman, a former employee of the Library’s Congressional Research Service, describes the invaluable collections, saying they’re on track to be “obscure, then decrepit, then inaccessible.”

“The Library of Congress has failed to capitalize on the Internet revolution, and it continues to become less and less relevant and less and less useful,” says Schuman, now with the tech advocacy group Demand Progress.

There are signs the Obama administration is also aiming for a radical shift in leadership—and maybe a high-profile one, too—as it searches for a replacement for Billington, who sped up the timeline on his replacement when last week he said he’d be departing at the end of the month rather than the end of the year, as has been previously announced. People close to the White House approached Walter Isaacson—a well-known figure in the tech world, as author of the celebrated biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and other works celebrating the digital revolution—about the position this summer, though Isaacson took his name out of the running, according to a source familiar with the situation. Isaacson, now CEO of the Aspen Institute in Washington, declined to comment.

The challenges in modernizing the Library of Congress are daunting. The institution has neglected to digitize many of the country’s founding documents; George Washington’s papers are online, for example, but Thomas Jefferson’s largely aren’t. The Copyright Office, housed inside the library, is largely paper-based, full of row upon row of musty card catalogs. A highly publicized project to archive every Twitter message—announced five years ago—has yet to materialize. And a spring report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Library could not calculate how many computers it has.

And tech advocates have even greater ambitions for the next Librarian of Congress, beyond the much-needed systems upgrade. They want Billington’s successor to be an evangelist for what they call the values of the Internet: defending the public’s right to get its hands on information online and tinker with everything from music to computer code, without worrying about facing huge fines or arrest.

“The Librarian of Congress should be like the Pope of libraries,” setting the tone and the agenda for libraries as a whole, says John Blyberg, director of the highly-regarded public library system in Darien, Connecticut. “People in that position are going to need the technical chops to understand what the issues are,” while having political savvy to operate in Washington, he said.

And those politics will be challenging to navigate, because the so-called content industries—whose books, movies and music they help produce fill the Library—are, too, invested in who will become just the 14th person in U.S. history to fill that seat.

“We’re very interested in who the next Librarian of Congress is,” says Terry Hart, the acting CEO of the Copyright Alliance, a non-partisan, non-profit coalition that includes Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and the RELX Group, the major scientific publisher formerly known as Reed Elsevier.

“We hope the next Librarian recognizes the value that creatives bring to society,” says Hart, “and the laws that protect that authorship.” Moreover, he wants a Librarian who will stick with what he calls the “hands-off” approach Librarians of Congress have tended take when it comes to the operations of the Copyright Office.

Just about everyone involved says that Obama’s choice has to be nimble enough to harness what has, over its 215-year history, become a sprawlingly complicated institution with considerable possible impact.

For one thing, the Library could be a leader on major digital issues like the electronic scanning of books—a topic that has been at the center of scorching battles between Google and publishers since 2004.

“A good Librarian of Congress would have gotten us to a national digitization strategy, and built consensus around it, years before Google came on the scene,” says University of Maryland law professor James Grimmelmann, who has studied the case extensively. “We could have had a much more constructive last decade.”

With Isaacson out of contention, other names still circulating include those with technological bents: University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, who has embraced “innovation” as one of the three pillars of the school’s future; John Palfrey, a former director of Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society now bringing digital learning to Phillips Academy as its head of school; and Susan Hildreth, ex-director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services currently heading several public library systems in Silicon Valley, according to multiple sources.

Also frequently mentioned are former American Library Association President Carla Hayden, a vocal PATRIOT Act foe and privacy advocate; Deborah Jacobs, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries Initiative focused on the role of information technologies in libraries; Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, known as a social media practitioner; and Brewster Kahle, founder of the widely known Internet Archive online resource.



Palfrey called the post “one of the greatest jobs in the universe.” But both he and Ferriero declined to comment on their own interests in the position. Hildreth says she has not spoken with administration officials. Kahle says he has talked with the White House “about my helping in any way,” adding that he’d be “honored” to be considered. The remaining figures did not respond to questions.

Those in favor of giving the Library a tech makeover say President Barack Obama should be a natural ally. After all, his team has talked about his own desire to make his coming presidential library digital-first—one where, for example, a young person halfway around the world might put on a pair of virtual reality goggles to watch one of his speeches.

One major focus is the future of the U.S. Copyright Office. The keeper of the country’s copyright records has been housed within the Library since Ainsworth Rand Spofford, an Abraham Lincoln appointee, arranged in 1870 for the institution to benefit from the copies of works deposited by creators registering copyright.

But in the decades since, the Copyright Office has struggled to keep up with the times, tied as it is to the Library’s antiquated systems. The office’s online registration system is difficult to use, making it challenging to both register copyrights and figure out who owns the rights to creative content; worse, the system was down recently for more than a week after a planned update failed.

The clunky office has also become a battleground between the entertainment and tech industries over distribution of songs, films and other content on the Internet. The music, movie and publishing industries warn of online piracy and want a crackdown on copyright violations, while tech thinks the office’s dysfunction makes it harder for Internet users to do basic things like figure out which public-domain music they can use for a YouTube video.

Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante has suggested that Congress spin her office out as a separate agency. Many in the tech industry, though, fearing an independent Copyright Office might be more sympathetic to entertainment interests, support the idea of upgrading the agency in place at the Library.

“The right candidate will need to be ready to modernize the Copyright Office to better represent all” interested parties, says Noah Theran, a spokesperson for the Internet Association, a lobbying group representing large Web companies like Google, Netflix and Amazon.

The Librarian of Congress also plays a key role in technology policy under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law criminalized technologies that help users avoid copyright restrictions and gave the Librarian of Congress the job of choosing when to make exceptions. Under this authority, Billington has waded into a host of consumer tech issues—allowing people to pull video snippets from DVDs for educational purposes, for example, but not letting them fast-forward through so-called unskippable DVD advertisements.

“The Librarian of Congress is basically the primary decider of what technologies are illegal under U.S. copyright law,” says Derek Khanna, a tech advocate who helped lead a successful push to convince the Obama White House to oppose the Library’s decision to prohibit cellphone unlocking. Congress eventually passed a law repealing Billington’s decision and making unlocking mobile phones legal, though it gave the Librarian discretion over whether the same rule applies to tablet computers like the iPad.

The White House declined to comment on its search for a new Librarian of Congress, citing its policy on personnel matters. But administration officials have cast a wide net in their conversations about the job. The 55,000-member American Library Association has been asked for its recommendations, says president Sari Feldman. She declined to share the names, saying the group agreed with a White House request to keep them confidential.

The association did, however, post a letter urging Obama to choose someone with experience as a working librarian. Past Librarians of Congress have included a poet, a diplomat and a newspaperman. But in this “rapidly changing information environment,” writes the group, the Librarian must have “deep [technical] expertise in librarianship and the management of digital assets” that comes from having led a major library.

Jessamyn West, a freelance librarian from Vermont, says she spoke with Obama administration officials after writing a blog post calling for a technologically engaged next Librarian of Congress caught their attention.

“Most interesting to me was how serious they took it,” says West, who added officials asked her whether there was any candidate that would satisfy everyone involved in the debate.

According to multiple sources, Obama administration officials are looking for someone with an understanding of the complications of copyright and public access to information in the digital age; someone who can serve as something akin to a public intellectual, perhaps because of a reputation as a scholar; and someone capable of running a complex institution.

They’re also eager, say sources, to find someone who can survive the political process: the job requires Senate confirmation.

With the Librarian of Congress post in the spotlight like, perhaps, never before, finding that ideal candidate likely won’t be easy. But it might well be one of the most enduring acts Obama has left to perform while in office. If history is any guide, it’s an appointment that will far outlast his presidency.