James H. Billington Director of Library of Congress Tends Worldís Largest Storehouse of Knowledge by John Shaw It does not happen very often that an overseas trip by a librarian generates global publicity. But when James H. Billington, director of the Library of Congress, recently traveled to Iran, his trip was fully reported in the worldís press, including prominent articles in the Washington Post and New York Times. The trip by Billington was heralded as an important act of cultural diplomacy. Billington is the highest-level U.S. official to visit Iran and meet openly with Iranian officials since relations between Iran and the United States were terminated in 1980 after militant students took over the American Embassy in Tehran. In an interview, Billington said his trip to Iran could be viewed from the perspective of cultural diplomacy, but its primary purpose was to discuss acquiring Iranian publications for the Library of Congress. "It was an unusual trip since no American official had been there in some time. I got a perfectly valid professional invitation from the head of the national library in Iran," he said. The White House approved Billingtonís visit, and the State Department briefed him before going. He met with the head of Iranís National Library, Mohammad Bojnourdi, and with top officials at Tehranís parliamentary library. "One of the reasons I went there was the immense amount of publishing they are doing in Iran. The Library of Congress is a world library, but our collection from Iran is not what it should be," Billington explained. "The trip seemed important given our collection deficit and because of the amount of material Iran has published since our relations were severed." Billington was sworn in as the Librarian of Congress on Sept. 14, 1987. He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and is the 13th person to hold the position since the library was established in 1800. A native of Bryn Mawr, Pa., Billington attended public schools in the Philadelphia area. He graduated from Princeton University with honors in 1950. Three years later he earned a doctorate from Oxford University, where we was a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College. After serving in the Army and in the Office of National Estimates, Billington taught history at Harvard from 1957 to 1962 and then at Princeton from 1964 to 1974. He headed the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars from 1973 to 1987, during which time he founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the Wilson Quarterly. Billington works out of a sprawling fifth-floor suite of offices in the libraryís Alexander Hamilton building on Capitol Hill. Scholarly, engaging and expansive, he is proud to lead one of the worldís top libraries. "The Congress of the United States has been the greatest patron of a library in the history of the world. The Library of Congress is the worldís largest storehouse of knowledge," he said. Billington said the library is still inspired and energized by the vision of Thomas Jefferson: that for a democracy to grow and flourish, it is essential for its citizens to have access to literally all of the knowledge available in the world. The library, he said, is determined to make its resources available and useful to Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The Library of Congress was founded in 1800 to serve the reference needs of Congress. The libraryís original collections were housed in the Capitol building until August 1814 when British troops invaded Washington and burned it down. The small congressional library of about 3,000 volumes was lost in the fire. Former President Thomas Jefferson offered as a replacement his personal library, which he had accumulated over half a century. Congress accepted Jeffersonís offer and allocated $23,950 for the collection of 6,487 books. Jeffersonís wide-ranging library became the foundation for a national library. The Library of Congress now occupies three sprawling buildings on Capitol Hill. It is the largest library in the world, with nearly 128 million items on about 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, 5 million music items and 57 million manuscripts. The library receives about 22,000 items each working day and adds about 10,000 items to the collections daily. Since 1962, Congress has maintained overseas offices to acquire, catalog, and preserve library and research materials from other countries where such materials are unavailable through conventional acquisition methods. The library has offices in New Delhi, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Nairobi and Islamabad, which acquire materials from more than 60 nations. In addition, about half of the libraryís books and serial collections are in languages other than English, with more than 450 languages represented in the collection. Billington said the Library of Congress serves many functions at once: a research service for Congress, the Copyright Office of Congress, a national library for the blind and physically handicapped, the home of the U.S. poet laureateóand the worldís largest library. Included here are the papers of 23 presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. It also holds the papers of such important Americans as Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Graham Bell, Irving Berlin, Frederick Douglass, George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Booker T. Washington and Walt Whitman. The libraryís American Memory National Digital program makes more than 8.5 million American historical items from the libraryís collections and other research institutions freely available online. Its law library is also the worldís largest. Treasures abound in these halls. The Library of Congressís Gutenberg Bible was purchased in 1930 and is one of three perfect copies on vellum in the world. The oldest written material in the library is a cuneiform tablet dating from 2040 BC. Other treasures include baseball cards, comic and cookbooks, as well as millions of maps, atlases, photographs, posters, microfilms, movies, rare books, music manuscripts and recordings, and radio and television broadcasts. Billington said the Library of Congress, like all libraries, faces a massive challenge with the arrival of the digital age. "Weíre trying to superimpose a whole virtual library on top of a traditional artifactual library so we can continue the historic task of the Library of Congress, which is to acquire, preserve and make accessible the worldís knowledge and Americaís creativity," Billington said. "We are faced with the greatest upheaval in the transmission of knowledge since the invention of the printing press: the electronic onslaught of digitized multimedia communication." Billington said the library receives an annual appropriation of more than $500 million from Congress. Additionally, it receives support from private groups and individuals. Several years ago, John Kluge made the largest monetary donation in the libraryís historyó$60 million to create a center within the library for advanced scholars and a Nobel-level prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities or social sciences. In addition to his work at the library, Billington is one of the countryís top experts on Russia. His knowledge of Russian history is based on frequent trips to the country over nearly five decades. Billington has accompanied 10 congressional delegations to Russia and the former Soviet Union. In June of 1988, he was invited by President and Mrs. Reagan to attend the Soviet Summit in Moscow. Billington is the author of several highly acclaimed books on Russia, including "The Icon and the Axe" (1966), "Fire in the Minds of Men" (1980), "The Face of Russia" (1998) and "Russia: In Search of Itself" (2004). He is also an elected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During his tenure at the library, Billington developed two major Russian-American programs: Meeting of the Frontiers, a bilingual online educational library, and the Open World Program, which has brought more than 8,000 young Russian leaders to the United States. Billingtonís most recent book on Russia assesses its struggle to find a post-Soviet identity. There is a tension, he argues, between Russiaís attempt to solidify its new, nominally democratic identity and its inclination to embrace an updated version of its old authoritarian tradition. "Uncertainty in a time of drastic change has produced a kind of cultural-psychological nervous breakdown," he said. Billington added that world peace depends to some extent on the way Russ ians decide to define themselves. "The Russians have been talking about their identity for a couple of hundred years, and they are very articulate talkers," he said. "The debate is very hot and itís going on inside people, even inside Vladimir Putin," he said, noting that Putin has autocratic, hard-line tendencies but also comes from a moderate political tradition in St. Petersburg. The librarian warned that the outcome of this Russian quest for an identity is of profound importance to the United States and the world. "Russia was, and is, the only country that has the capacity to destroy the United States. Weíre worrying about little countries getting weapons of mass destruction. But Russia is the Wal-Mart of WMD," he said. "Russia is still the dominant force in the Eurasian landmass. It has most of the worldís untapped natural resources. Russia is a huge nationó11 time zonesóthat borders on the two things most geopolitical thinkers are worried about: a tier of Islamic states to the south and the rising power of China to the east." Billington said he places more historical importance than others in American academia do on the moral passion and religious dimension of Russian culture. "I believe an enduring positive identity will only happen if Russia is able to merge Western political and economic institutions with an indigenous recovery of the religious and moral dimensions of its own culture." John Shaw is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.