Library of Congress Chief Retires Under Fire – The New York Times.
In a 2013 audit, the library’s inspector general warned that millions of items, some from as far back as the 1980s, remained piled in overflowing buildings and warehouses, virtually lost to the world. In addition, just a small fraction of its 24 million books are available to read online, 200 years after Thomas Jefferson laid the foundation for a vast national library by selling Congress his personal collection of books after the War of 1812.
The latest government investigation, delivered in March, accused the library of “widespread weaknesses” in managing its technology resources and cited a “lack of strong, consistent leadership” in that area. That report, and other recent complaints about Dr. Billington’s leadership, had caught the attention of the library’s congressional patrons.
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Brewster, Jason and Carl should run whatever we’re going to call the Library of Congress going forward.
The Internet Archive (archive.org) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive has an historical web collection (the Wayback Machine) of over 150 billion web pages, about 240,000 movies, over 500,000 audio items (including over 70,000 live concerts), over 1,800,000 texts, 1600 education items, and over 30,000 software items. And we’re growing bigger every day!
The Internet Archive’s Collections Team started this blog to highlight new collections and interesting items. We hope you enjoy it!
Digital Librarian http://openlibrary.org http://brewster.kahle.org http://archive.org @internetarchive @openlibrary – Brewster Kahle.
Proprietor of http://TEXTFILES.COM , historian, filmmaker, archivist, famous cat maintenance staff. Works on/for/over the Internet Archive – Jason Scott.
Public.Resource.Org! “Making Government Information More Accessible”- Carl Malamud.