Librarian of Congress James Billington ’50
became the first head of a U.S. government agency to visit Iran in 25 years.
(Courtesy Library of Congress)
PROFILE James Billington ’50 Disseminating knowledge
At an age when most of his contemporaries have long since retired,
James Billington ’50 presides over the Library of Congress
with the exuberance of a small boy permitted to run amok in his
eccentric Uncle Sam’s attic. Now in his 20th year at the helm
of the venerable institution that advertises itself as “the
largest repository of human knowledge in the world,” the former
Princeton history professor brims with enthusiasm about the discoveries
and improvements he continues to make.
Billington’s current infatuations run the gamut from blogs — which
he used to research attitudes in the post-Soviet society for his latest book,
Russia in Search of Itself (2004) — to technology that is obsolete. He
recently discovered more than 10,000 wax cylinders of 1890s music in the library’s
vaults, which staffers have begun to dub to CDs to make the music accessible
to today’s listeners.
He’s a man on a mission: to preserve the library’s approximately
130 million holdings for future generations and to disseminate them more widely
to today’s scholars and to the public. To that end, Billington has presided
over a major project to make some of the library’s most precious holdings,
such as rare maps and drafts of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
and second inaugural address, available on the Web. “We’re digitizing
things that before were accessible to only a few people,” Billington says.
He also has involved the library in a “huge task” — archiving
Web pages, to preserve the best of today’s Internet.
His outreach efforts aren’t merely virtual. In October 2004, Billington
became the first head of a U.S. government agency to visit Iran in 25 years.
In December 2005 the former Iranian national librarian came to Washington for
a return visit. Billington’s trip also resulted in exchanges of material
between Iran’s national library and the Library of Congress, and he hopes
his trip will build other bridges between the two societies. “Culture is
a meeting ground,” he says.
Completion of the new Capitol Visitors Center, expected late this year or
early in 2007, will present another challenge to Billington. He predicts that
the center, which will provide easy underground access between the Capitol and
the library, will increase the number of library visitors each year from 1 million
to 3.5 million. Billington sees it as an opportunity to show off its riches.
He’s already planning displays of some of the library’s lesser-known
holdings, such
as patents from the U.S. Copyright Office.
Retiring doesn’t seem to be on Billington’s agenda. He notes
that his brother, David Billington ’50, an active member of Princeton’s
engineering faculty, “is older than I am” by two years. (David served
a year in the Navy before entering college and James skipped a grade in elementary
school.) The younger Billington believes he still has work to do. “The
library is an incredible gold mine,” he says. “There’s never
a day that goes by that you don’t find something new around here, and one
thing I hope before I leave is to get more of it out so people can enjoy it.”
