HEARINGS CONDUCTED BY THE SUBCOMMITTEE, EMMET O'NEAL (CHAIRMAN), CHARLES H. LEAVY, BUTLER B. HARE, D. LANE POWERS, AND NOBLE J. JOHNSON, OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, IN CHARGE OF THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH APPROPRIATION BILL, 1941, ON THE DAYS FOLLOWING, NAMELY:

THURSDAY APRIL 24, 1941.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

STATEMENTS OF ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS; DR. LUTHER H. EVANS, CHIEF ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN; JOHN T. VANCE, LAW LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS; L. QUINCY MUMFORD, DIRECTOR OF THE PROCESSING DEPARTMENT; VERNER W. CLAPP, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO THE LIBRARIAN; DR. ERNEST S. GRIFFITH, CHIEF OF THE LEGISLATIVE REFERENCE SERVICE; DR. LEWIS HANKE, CHIEF OF THE HISPANIC FOUNDATION; DR. LEICESTER B. HOLLAND, CHIEF OF THE FINE ARTS DIVISION; DAVID C. MEARNS, SUPERINTENDENT OF THE READING ROOMS; GEORGE A. SCHWEGMANN, JR., CHIEF OF THE UNION CATALOG, AND DR. HAROLD SPIVACKE, CHIEF OF THE MUSIC DIVISION

Mr. O'NEAL. Mr. MacLeish, we are very glad to have you before us, sir, and will be very glad to have you proceed in any way you would like to proceed, whether by making a statement without interruption and then submitting yourself to questions, if that meets with your wishes in the matter, or in any other way which you desire.

Mr. MACLEISH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I should like to follow that procedure. We realize the limitations of time under which the committee operates and we have attempted to prepare ourselves to present this in a way to conserve time.

Mr. O'NEAL. Have you a prepared statement which you could furnish the committee members so they can follow you?

Mr. MACLEISH. We have a prepared statement which I believe is in the hands of all of the committee members-this justification of the estimates—and the introductory section presents the general picture; but, if I may, I should like to say a brief word simply to summarize what is there.

Mr. O'NEAL. If you care to read it, we will be very glad to have you read it-whatever your wishes are.

Mr. MACLEISH. I would like to speak briefly, if I might, about it, and then submit it for the record.

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LEGISLATIVE BHANCH: APPROPRIATION BILL, 1942

GENERAL STATEMENT

The point I should like to make is that the estimates this year are directly and organically related to last year's estimates and to the appropriation made upon last year's estimates and to our experience in applying those appropriations. Last year's estimates, in turn, reflected the situation resulting from two events. The first was the completion and opening of the annex of the Library in 1938, and the other was the appointment of a new Librarian in 1939. And the significance of those events was this: Prior to the completion of the annex and for some 10 years back, limitations of space in the old building had made it impossible for the Librarian of Congress to pass on to the committee estimates of needs as submitted to him by his chiefs. When, in 1938, the annex was completed and when the Librarian did feel free to submit estimates of 181 new positions the committee felt it was desirable to postpone consideration until the appointment of the new Librarian, since that was in the offing. Therefore the hearings for the fiscal year 1941 were the first hearings in about 10 years' time in which it was possible to consider the problem of the Library as a whole.

EFFECT OF INCREASES GRANTED FOR 1941

Now the action of the committee and the Congress on those estimates enabled the Library to attack the most pressing part of the problem, namely, the processing of books, which was falling behind and with respect to which the Library was in a rather serious situation. Other problems were postponed or deferred. Those were, first, the general administrative organization of the Library; and secondly, the staffing of the service divisions, as distinguished from the divisions which process books and prepare them for the shelves. Now, acting under this Appropriation Act for 1941, the Library Administration did the following things: First, we reorganized our processing operations and increased the processing staff as the appropriation permitted us to do; secondly, we went as far as we could with existing means to set up an efficient administrative organization; thirdly, we attempted, by a reorganization within the servicing divisions, to make the staffs of those divisions work as well as they could.

THE PROCESSING DEPARTMENT

I would like, briefly, to go into a little more detail as to what we did, particularly in the processing department, where the appropriation act last year enabled us to set up 54 new positions.

What we did, first of all, was to secure a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, of New York, which enabled us to bring in three of the most distinguished librarians the country has, to advise us as to the setting up of the whole highly technical operation. We got, I think, the three best men available. They worked on the thing very hard for 6 weeks and they made a report which I have here, which is published as a confidential document, but which, of course, is at the disposal of the committee if they wish to examine it.

Next, we looked for a director to put these findings in operation, in the position of Coordinator of the Processing Divisions, under the appropriation, and we were fortunate enough to be able to secure, for

1 year, from the New York Public Library, Mr. Mumford, who was released for that time. Mr. Mumford is an expert in that field and had sat in with the Librarian's Committee and, therefore, knew the situation. However, he was unable to come until last September and it was not until September that we began appointing our people and making actual changes.

What we have done as a first step, therefore, is to reorganize the processing operation, both as regards its subdivisions and as regards the actual physical flow of the work. We have changed the relation of the various units to each other on the floor, so that work flows naturally.

WORK INCLUDED IN "PROCESSING"

Mr. O'NEAL. Would you just make a statement as to how inclusive the word "processing" is, so that we know what it covers?

Mr. MACLEISH. Yes. The word "processing" is a word which applies to all of the various functions of the Library by which books are brought to the shelves-the ordering of the books, their accessioning, their cataloging providing proper author and subject entries, and so forth, for each item their classification within the Library scheme of classification, and the shelf listing and final preparation for the shelves-in other words, everything that is done from the time the book is ordered until the book is properly numbered and listed and placed on the shelves.

Mr. O'NEAL. Does that take into account the rehabilitation of books, papers, and magazines in the Library?

Mr. MACLEISH. Binding, and so forth?

Mr. O'NEAL. Suppose some of your old documents, old papers, needed to be preserved-would that be considered part of the processing operation?

Mr. MACLEISH. Well, sir, that is a very difficult question to answer, because we are now wrestling with the question of whether the binding operation ought to be considered as part of the processing, or whether the binding operation ought to be considered as part of the preservation of the collections, once they are on the shelves. That is, you have two problems in binding; one the binding of new material which comes in unbound; the other is repairing materials which are decayed on the shelves, and you could put the operation either under the care of the keeper of collections, or on the processing side.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS UNDER NEW ORGANIZATION

Now, the changes which I have described were made organizationally and new positions were set up, and the following effects can be reported. First of all, I should say again that these appointments have been made only over the last few months and, since the new Processing Department is only just now fully staffed, we cannot look for very much change as yet in production. However, it is fair to say that, even through this period of internal reorganization, production has held up and shows some increase, and we expect to show much more increase shortly.

In the Accessions Division, which is part of the processing operation, we have paid off $70,000 in back bills which have been there, some of them, for a long period of time. We have set up new statistical controls which enable us to follow accurately the operations of

that Division. We now have an adequate accounting procedure, introduced with the advice of the General Accounting Office.

PAYMENTS OF ACCUMULATED OBLIGATIONS

Mr. LEAVY. When you say you have paid off back bills, do you mean you have discharged from one governmental agency to another an obligation, or that you have paid some individual?

Mr. MACLEISH. We have paid the dealers, sir.

Mr. LEAVY. Well, do they allow thier bills, or have you permitted or has the Library permitted bills to run beyond the fiscal year? Mr. MACLEISH. It had, sir.

Mr. LEAVY. Beyond the fiscal year in which the tranasction was consummated?

Mr. MACLEISH. It had in the past; yes, sir.

Mr. LEAVY. Are not you trying to limit your purchases now for the current fiscal year to the current appropriation?

Mr. MACLEISH. We are now; and we have also been successful in paying off a large back arrearage of bills.

Mr. LEAVY. Do you have any now that confront you?

Mr. MACLEISH. We will have the entire arrearage of $70,000 worth of bills cleaned up by the end of the fiscal year. In fact, they are practically cleaned up now.

Mr. O'NEAL. Do you have any appropriation for that purpose in the 1941 bill?

Mr. MACLEISH. We wrestled with this matter with the General Accounting Office and the procedure to be adopted. If I may, I would like to postpone a discussion of that, since we have a question here as to the payment of certain bills which come in after the period for which the appropriation is available, and there is a question of language which we would like to take up.

Mr. O'NEAL. And you would rather not answer the question about the $70,000 that you have cleaned up now?

Mr. MACLEISH. We did that with the approval of the Comptroller General.

Mr. O'NEAL. But not out of any amount estimated and appropriated for in the 1941 Budget?

Mr. MACLEISH. No, sir. We did it in this way: First of all, we canceled a lot of outstanding orders. We then proceeded to pay off bills, to bring bills forward and pay them off.

Mr. O'NEAL. And that was within your discretion, to cancel orders, or to pay your bills?

Mr. MACLEISH. It was within our discretion to cancel orders, and, since the appropriation runs for 2 years, we are able to use the appropriation for that purpose.

Mr. O'NEAL. You did not exceed the total amount?

Mr. MACLEISH. No, sir; we did not.

Mr. O'NEAL. But you did lose some discounts, I presume, on those purchases?

Mr. MACLEISH. May I put it the other way around: Our new method of procedure, by which we can pay our bills promptly, enables us to take discounts.

Mr. O'NEAL. But there were discounts lost?
Mr. MACLEISH. There were; yes, sir.

IMPROVEMENT OF THE CATALOGS

As regards the processing in general, outside of the Accessions Division, we have been able to do the following things over this winter: The public catalog, that is, the catalog which the public uses in going to the Library, has been filed down to date for the first time in years. There were about 40,000 unfiled cards which were kept in an outside supplement, and you had to go to the outside supplement if you wanted to find what had not been filed down to date. We have also handled almost all of the supplement of 200,000 cards in the so-called official catalog, which is the catalog used by the catalogers in their work. There were about 200,000 of those cards; they are almost all now filed in. An arrearage of 250,000 cards in the Card Preparation Section has also been practically eliminated. The arrearage of 40,000 books which had been standing on the shelves unlabeled now has been reduced to 10,000, and will disappear altogether by the end of the fiscal year. The very large arrearage in the Proofreading Section of the Catalogue Division has been completely eliminated, and so forth.

Those are some of the details which I refer to simply to indicate the nature of the improvement in the work.

COST ACCOUNTING METHODS ADOPTED

In the meantime, we have put in records of the time required for each operation in the Processing Division, which will enable us to see where the delays are, where we are losing time which we might not have to lose. We have also put in statistical controls which we hope will enable us to estimate, from this time on, the actual cost of the processing operations as accurately as possible.

We are making our new books available much more rapidly than we used to, and are getting our printed catalog cards out to other libraries much more rapidly than we used to.

ARREARAGE OF UNPROCESSED MATERIAL

And there was, as this committee knows, I believe, a large arrearage of unprocessed materials in the Library, estimated to be about one million and a half books. We are attacking that problem-not by asking for money to take on extra help-but by wading into it until we have cleaned it up under the following procedure:

We have set up a Searching Section to go through that material to find out how much of it is duplicate material which does not require to be cataloged; to find out how much of it we can well give to some other Library-for example, to the Surgeon General's Library; to find out how much of it is simply travel folders and things of that kind, that does not need to be cataloged. And when we get through with that operation, we will have isolated the backlog job, and we will know what the chaff is in this back material.

So far as the administration of the Library is concerned, we were obliged to use the means we had at our disposal, because this was one of the questions that the committee last year rather deferred. The problem there is a very serious one.