The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.
1. THE FIRST PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make knowledge and creativity available to the United States Congress.
The Congress is the lawmaking body of the United States. As the repository of a universal collection of human knowledge and the creative work of the American people, the Library has the primary mission to make this material available and to identify, analyze and synthesize the information it contains to make it useful to the lawmakers who are the elected representatives of the American people.
2. THE SECOND PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain for the present and future use of the Congress and the nation:
The collections must continue to be comprehensive in order to keep pace with the rapid proliferation of information. The Library of Congress is the only library in the world that collects universally. If this time-honored tradition is diminished then the Federal government and the American free enterprise system will be the poorer for it.
3. THE THIRD PRIORITY of the Library of Congress is to make its collections maximally accessible to (in order of priority)
It is unprecedented in human history -- and a uniquely American offer -- to open public access to an institution that is in many respects the working library of a government and a de facto national library.
The unifying purpose of providing the public with essential library services, such as cataloging and reference help, is to afford as much access to useful information as possible to each of these three constituencies. In addition to on-site service, the National Digital Library will provide remote electronic access to the most interesting and important documents of American history and culture for local schools, libraries, businesses, and homes across America.
The unique and ambitious mandate that the Congress has given its Library during the past two centuries is a stunningly original expression of a broader American democratic ideal. For a democracy to be dynamic and self-correcting, its governing institutions must be not only continuously accountable to the people but also solidly based on a body of knowledge that is both constantly expanding and available equally to those who legislate and to those who elect the legislators.
Equal access to knowledge for both governors and governed, rich and poor, represents an essential minimal form of empowerment in a pluralistic democracy-and has found expression in our system of public libraries and public schools. The Congress has given to the Library a series of centralized national functions to perform that are essential to the health of these local institutions: setting bibliographic standards, providing subsidized cataloging, storing the records and artifacts of the copyrighted creativity of America, and creating and delivering nationwide reading materials for blind and physically handicapped persons.
The Congress has now recognized that, in an age in which information is increasingly communicated and stored in electronic form, the Library should provide remote access electronically to key materials. For the general public, the Congress has endorsed the creation of a National Digital Library Program through a private-public partnership that will create high-quality content in electronic form and thereby provide remote access to the most interesting and educationally valuable core of the Library's Americana collections. Schools, libraries, businesses, and homes will have access to important historical material in their own localities together with the same freedom readers have always had within public reading rooms to interpret, rearrange, and use the material for their own individual needs.
4. THE FOURTH PRIORITY is to add interpretive and educational value to the basic resources of the Library in order to enhance the quality of the creative work and intellectual activity derived from these resources, and to highlight the importance of the Library's contributions to the nation's well-being and future progress.
Implicit in the broad and international inclusiveness of the Library's clientele (both here and elsewhere) is another ideal of American democracy: the desire to promote the free exchange of ideas.
There are three essential aspects to this priority that are uniquely available through the Library of Congress:
The Library staff will increase its role as knowledge navigators by helping more people find appropriate materials in a swelling sea of unsorted information and pointing them to services and resources unique to the Library of Congress. This requires not merely more development and retraining of staff than the Library has previously been able to do, but also facilitating in new ways more extensive and systematic use by researchers of the distinctive materials that only the Library of Congress has. Programs for the general public, such as exhibits or publications, must demonstrate the value and usefulness of the collections.
ENABLING INFRASTRUCTURE
To accomplish its mission and support the Library's four priorities, the Library must have an efficient and effective infrastructure with five key components: