Serious Gatekeepers.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Librarian of Congress James Billington objects to putting books online - Brief Article

The Library of Congress is not a user-friendly institution. The stacks are closed, so if you want to look at a book, you have to fill out a form and ask a librarian to fetch it for you. If you're lucky, you'll get it within two hours. If you're really lucky, it'll actually have the in- formation you were looking for; if not, you're back at step one. And you can't take any tomes home.

Now some of the library's materials have been put on the Internet. Accessing them is a completely different experience: fast, fun, and fruitful. Scouting through its American Memory site (lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem), one can enjoy everything from early Krazy Kat films to haunting old Ukrainian-American music to photos from Orson Welles' famous all-black production of Macbeth. But don't expect any books to join those materials online...