The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music's journey from dream to copyright.
Just as military contractors, air traffic controllers and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works - whether famous novels or poems scribbled on napkins - to the collection, preservation and digitalisation of millions of books, photographs, maps and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission.
Of the $85 billion in federal cuts for the current fiscal year, known as sequestration, half will come from military spending, and half from domestic programs like health care, research, education and the library. The library's budget for the year has declined to $598.4 million, a four per cent cut that is likely to slow its digitalisation effort and has already caused copyright applications to back up. The worry spreads far beyond Washington because the Library of Congress - founded in 1800, burned and pillaged by the British in 1814 and replaced by Thomas Jefferson's personal library - is home to an unrivaled history of the nation's wars, presidencies, culture and place in the world.
"The Library of Congress is obviously a critical research library for many scholars in this country," said Thomas Teper, the associate dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "They have much more than books. They have a vital part in preserving our cultural heritage. Without preserving these resources, there is no real opportunity for people to study them to learn from them."
Millions of Americans use the library each year though research visits and on tours, or by checking out its website or registering their claims to copyright. Yet, many are oblivious to the library's broad mandate and simply associate it with, well, reading, or those soft-focus public service announcements in which a celebrity trumpets some random fact contained in the Library of Congress.
A tour of the library's vast operations, spread across three large buildings in a sprawling Capitol Hill complex, reveals the enormity of its mission to preserve manuscripts for the future and to get at least some of them online.
On a recent morning, a pair of workers toiling in a room that seemed more like a pharmaceutical lab than like a library were carefully sifting through the library's collection of historical meeting notes and other manuscripts from the NAACP. The papers, like roughly 250,000 books and one million manuscript sheets each year, were undergoing a process that removes the acid that causes them to discolor and disintegrate. Because of the looming cuts, the deacidification process, ideally carried out before older books and documents are stored, could be reduced by 40 per cent over the next five years.
"What all these things have in common is that they are going to decay," said Mark Sweeney, the library's director for preservation.
During the 2012 financial year year, which ended September 30, nearly six million items from the library's collections were bound, repaired, mass-deacidified, microfilmed or reformatted for restoration. Most of these programmes will experience cuts in coming months.
Fantasia, the R&B star and one-time "American Idol" winner, recently slipped into the library to register a song for copyright, another of the library's most visible and important functions. Last year the library registered more than 511,500 claims to copyright, many of which fill the storage rooms and off-site locations, walls of hopes and dreams.
Roughly 2,000 new items are filed per day. "People will write a poem on a piece of paper and send it in to get it registered," said David Christopher, chief of operations for the library's Copyright Office. "Then they will call and ask, 'Did you get my poem?' They're passionate about it. To them, it's their creative output." The office contributed more than 636,000 copies of books, serial publications, motion pictures, sound recordings, printed music and other creative works to the library's collection last year; the average annual value of newly copyrighted works is $30 million.
Just when Congress has been contemplating new copyright laws to address technological challenges and serve the public interest, the budget for the Copyright Office has fallen by 8.4 per cent since financial year 2010. With 44 employees having taken early retirement, the office's staff is now 18 per cent below the authorised level. Digitalisation has been viewed lately as an especially vital part of the library's mission, given its potential to make parts of the collection available to those who cannot make the trek to Washington. (A tiny portion of the collection is currently available digitally.)
The Library of Congress spent $1 million in fiscal 2012 to digitise parts of the collections, but that budget will be reduced to $500,000 in the current financial year. As with all across-the-board cuts made under sequestration, the fear is that it will take the library years to dig itself out.
Just as military contractors, air traffic controllers and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works - whether famous novels or poems scribbled on napkins - to the collection, preservation and digitalisation of millions of books, photographs, maps and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission.
Of the $85 billion in federal cuts for the current fiscal year, known as sequestration, half will come from military spending, and half from domestic programs like health care, research, education and the library. The library's budget for the year has declined to $598.4 million, a four per cent cut that is likely to slow its digitalisation effort and has already caused copyright applications to back up. The worry spreads far beyond Washington because the Library of Congress - founded in 1800, burned and pillaged by the British in 1814 and replaced by Thomas Jefferson's personal library - is home to an unrivaled history of the nation's wars, presidencies, culture and place in the world.
"The Library of Congress is obviously a critical research library for many scholars in this country," said Thomas Teper, the associate dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "They have much more than books. They have a vital part in preserving our cultural heritage. Without preserving these resources, there is no real opportunity for people to study them to learn from them."
Millions of Americans use the library each year though research visits and on tours, or by checking out its website or registering their claims to copyright. Yet, many are oblivious to the library's broad mandate and simply associate it with, well, reading, or those soft-focus public service announcements in which a celebrity trumpets some random fact contained in the Library of Congress.
A tour of the library's vast operations, spread across three large buildings in a sprawling Capitol Hill complex, reveals the enormity of its mission to preserve manuscripts for the future and to get at least some of them online.
On a recent morning, a pair of workers toiling in a room that seemed more like a pharmaceutical lab than like a library were carefully sifting through the library's collection of historical meeting notes and other manuscripts from the NAACP. The papers, like roughly 250,000 books and one million manuscript sheets each year, were undergoing a process that removes the acid that causes them to discolor and disintegrate. Because of the looming cuts, the deacidification process, ideally carried out before older books and documents are stored, could be reduced by 40 per cent over the next five years.
"What all these things have in common is that they are going to decay," said Mark Sweeney, the library's director for preservation.
During the 2012 financial year year, which ended September 30, nearly six million items from the library's collections were bound, repaired, mass-deacidified, microfilmed or reformatted for restoration. Most of these programmes will experience cuts in coming months.
Fantasia, the R&B star and one-time "American Idol" winner, recently slipped into the library to register a song for copyright, another of the library's most visible and important functions. Last year the library registered more than 511,500 claims to copyright, many of which fill the storage rooms and off-site locations, walls of hopes and dreams.
Roughly 2,000 new items are filed per day. "People will write a poem on a piece of paper and send it in to get it registered," said David Christopher, chief of operations for the library's Copyright Office. "Then they will call and ask, 'Did you get my poem?' They're passionate about it. To them, it's their creative output." The office contributed more than 636,000 copies of books, serial publications, motion pictures, sound recordings, printed music and other creative works to the library's collection last year; the average annual value of newly copyrighted works is $30 million.
Just when Congress has been contemplating new copyright laws to address technological challenges and serve the public interest, the budget for the Copyright Office has fallen by 8.4 per cent since financial year 2010. With 44 employees having taken early retirement, the office's staff is now 18 per cent below the authorised level. Digitalisation has been viewed lately as an especially vital part of the library's mission, given its potential to make parts of the collection available to those who cannot make the trek to Washington. (A tiny portion of the collection is currently available digitally.)
The Library of Congress spent $1 million in fiscal 2012 to digitise parts of the collections, but that budget will be reduced to $500,000 in the current financial year. As with all across-the-board cuts made under sequestration, the fear is that it will take the library years to dig itself out.
© 2013 The New York Times News Service