Very slightly related: One of the most satisfying interactions with a public organization I've ever had was finding an image in the LoC collection of Shasta Dam misidentified as Fontana Dam in North Carolina. A reverse image search revealed that it had apparently been that way for years, and was used in all sorts of contexts by third parties as a picture of Fontana Dam, despite the presence of a 14,000 foot snow-capped volcano in the background, a geographic feature which is notably absent from North Carolina.
I emailed the contact address, and not only did they respond promptly, they corrected the listing and added a note about the previous misidentification and emailed me to let me know that it had been corrected.
One thing that most people don't have an appreciation for is how effective the non-political departments of the US Government are, and also how at risk such jewels are for backsliding into incompetence and corruption if poorly managed.
This is true because the non-political departments of US government have ultimately very limited power, so there is little incentive to either capture them or destroy them by partisan actors. Political operatives would much rather control something like FBI or EEOC instead of LoC or USFS. This should motivate us to ensure that each department’s capabilities are as restricted as possible to achieve its mandate, so that Library of Congress can focus on archiving materials, and not, say, drafting rules on what is required and banned from public libraries across the country (a very contentious topic these days, apparently).
Of course, the political operatives want the opposite: they want to concentrate and extend the power of government agencies as much as possible. The incentive to do so for administrative agencies is strong: elected politicians can be voted out, so they have to be more careful, but career bureaucrats are effectively not removable. The result is a fight for the control of the agency, and then, if one side wins the control, to diminish the power/funding of the agency, which obviously is not conducive to agency being effective at its stated goals.
Huh I always thought of the Library of Congress as having pretty strong political power -- under the DMCA Section 1201, every 3 years the Librarian of Congress enacts new rules proposed by the Copyright Office (part of the LOC) and can broadly determine that entire categories of software are not illegal DRM-circumvention devices.
They see that power as very, very narrow. For one, they have to renew exceptions every 3 years, for another, they've shied away from doing anything at all to some of the broader categories that have been proposed.
Good description of the essence of democracy and the path of it sliding into authoritarianism.
In a democracy all of the institutions of government and society are relatively independent, with power spread out and relatively balanced between them. This goes for the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of govt, as well as the civil service, the press, the academy, industry.
In contrast, as politicians start controlling "something like FBI or EEOC", and start forcing the justice department, the press, academic institutions and other government and societal structures to bend to the will of the leader, you soon have authoritarianism.
Once it goes that way, it is very difficult to restore a democracy.
You are certainly right, it is not constantly and actively maintained.
After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, it's said that when Ben Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall, someone yelled: “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
To which Franklin responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Wise Words.
And, as Plato said: "The penalty for good men not participating in politics is to be ruled by evil men.".
What a great example. Only reason this did not happen is because the Supreme Court managed to call foul, belatedly though as it had. Can we always depend on Supreme Court doing the right thing and limiting the government’s overreach? The answer is, clearly no, as history gives plenty examples of SCOTUS rubber-stamping clear overreach. The best example is, I think, Wickard v. Filburn, which opened the floodgates, and gave the federal government powers that the writers of the constitutions would have never believed. There are more recent examples as well, for example Kelo v. City of New London, which ruled that government can kick you out of your home and give it to someone else, if it believes that it will create jobs and bring more tax revenues, even if it doesn’t end up happening.
> The Library's content, programs, and expertise are national treasures – we are dedicated to sharing them as broadly as possible. The growth of the Library's digital content, which includes our collections, has increased exponentially every year. We will make that content available and accessible to more people, work carefully to respect the expectations of the Congress and the rights of creators, and support the use of our content in software-enabled research, art, exploration, and learning.
> Exponentially grow our collections
> The Library will continue to build a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity. We will expand our digital acquisitions program, as outlined in Collecting Digital Content at the Library of Congress; continue our aggressive digitization program, which prioritizes the Library's unique treasures; and improve search and access services that facilitate discovery of materials in both physical and digital formats.
> We will expedite the availability of newly acquired or created content to the web and on-site access systems. This will mean making improvements to the procedures and tools we use to move content from acquisition or creation to access, which will be critical as we continue to experience exponential growth in the size of our digital collection. We will also improve tools to make it easier for Library staff to enhance content after publication, such as adding additional description or information about the conservation of objects.
You’re comparing two very different things there. Institutional libraries and government archives have records going back centuries, many of which can’t be found anywhere else. Even your local library might have some obscure local newspapers on microfilm from 100 years ago, that haven’t been digitized yet (we’ve admittedly made progress on this problem over the last decade).
To answer these “who am I” questions posed in the article, of unidentified historical photos, we need institutions like the Library of Congress digitizing their records, uniting them with other institutional datasets, and organizing them in a way that we can run facial recognition algorithms on them. The answer to “who are these musicians circa 1930” probably comes from a local newspaper that ended publication 50 years ago.
In case it isn’t abundantly clear, this is going to take decades to accomplish. These institutions operate on timelines measured in centuries, not weeks. They care deeply about problems like bit rot when replacing physical archives. If it is lost to the world in mere decades, it is not useful to them.
The Internet Archive is of little help here, beyond sharing technical information for efficient archival and retrieval of truly massive public datasets.
> You’re comparing two very different things there.
This is such an important point. Governments have longevity and universal service requirements that others just don't. I am personally a charge-ahead-and-try-shit kind of person. But I recognize that works for me because I can easily say "fuck it" and move on from my experiments. Anything the LOC does they're stuck with, possibly for centuries.
So I'm glad that they proceed at a pace that seems positively glacial to me. That's what success on those timescales often requires.
Furthermore, there's digitizing things and there's providing unlimited open access to those digitized things. The LoC needs to tread lightly on the latter to a degree that other institutions may choose not to do. Just because they're the LoC doesn't mean they can throw open digital access to anything they feel like.
That’s right, because many departments have their effectiveness undermined by legislation with the intent of undermining the existence of those departments altogether.
The National Archives is equally incredible and responsive: I made a Twitter bot[1] to automatically post photos from the DOCUMERICA project[2], and found handful of missing scans (just a few dozen in over 10,000) in the process.
I emailed them to ask about it, and they responded in a handful of days[3].
I emailed the National Archives about the nature of a quote from an HN comment ages ago. I spent a lot of time digging for sources and got stuck at a “box” somewhere in the Archives.
I emailed the Archives and was politely informed that I would need to visit in person to ascertain the exact document.
A few days later an Archives staffer emailed me under secrecy, saying they were not allowed to be doing this, but then provided exact details for what I needed.
It was truly an excellent internet moment for me. Sometimes the government is cool!
So much of the government relies on staffers discreetly working around the kafkaesque bureaucracy, and everyone involved turning a blind eye and respecting their need for discretion.
I've been to both these dams. Searching DDG for "Fontana Dam" still brings up a bunch of pictures of Shasta Dam. I wonder how long the correction will take (if ever?) to work its way through the Internet? How long ago did LoC make the correction?
I emailed the contact address, and not only did they respond promptly, they corrected the listing and added a note about the previous misidentification and emailed me to let me know that it had been corrected.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2011630316/