ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


108

Inside Washington

Christopher W right 
Assistant Director 

A L A  Washington Office

Columnist Drew Pearson used to take great 
delight in detailing the junkets of prominent 
members of Congress and the upper-level bu­
reaucracy. His favorite was the Paris Air Show, 
a gala event frequented by members of the 
armed forces committees, their staffs, and Pen­
tagon brass, who would return from a week in 
gay Paree with a case of champagne and a 
sheaf of bills from Pigalle, claiming them as 
travel expenses.

Pearson’s colorful reports gave junketing a 
bad name and high-minded legislators began 
slapping a ceiling on government travel funds 
in the late 1950s.

During this period of new morality someone 
discovered that the employees of the Library 
of Congress were also in the travel game, flit­
ting off to a government-funded holiday in Chi­
cago in January and the like. As a result Con­
gress added a ceiling to the amount LC could 
spend sending its staff to “meetings.”

The ceihng was temporarily removed in the 
1960s bu t reimposed in 1972, some said at the 
behest of Rep. Frank Bow, the ranking Repub­
lican on the House Appropriations Committee 
and a renowned curmudgeon.

As a result, just as the library was making 
major strides in machine-readable cataloging, 
paper preservation, and bibliographic control, 
its staff was cut off from communicating these 
advances through participation in professional 
seminars and colloquia. LC got the reputation 
of being aloof, disinterested in the outside li­
brary community, and paranoid.

Now the library has asked the House Sub­
committee on Legislative Branch Appropria­
tions, which approves the LC budget, to re­
move the ceiling and to appropriate $94,000 
for travel to meetings next year—up from $57,- 
500 in fiscal year 1975.

The specific words that acting librarian John 
Lorenz asked the committee to remove are con­
tained in the next-to-last paragraph in the LC 
budget, under the heading “administrative pro­
visions.” The paragraph limits to $57,500 the 
amount the Librarian of Congress can make 
available from the library’s travel funds “for at­
tendance at meetings concerned with the func­
tion or activity for which the appropriation is 
made.”

The problem is that someone then has to 
make a differentiation between “attendance at 
meetings” and ordinary travel on government 
business. For instance, is it government busi­
ness to appear on a panel to explain to catalog­
e d  how the MARC serial communications for­
mat works? Or is this the personal, professional 
activity of the librarian?

Forced to abide by the intent of the law, LC 
incorporated this definition into its regulations:

The following are considered attendance at 
meetings:

1. General membership meetings of an asso­
ciation, even though the employee is a speaker 
or participant. . . .

2. Workshops, seminars and symposia spon­
sored or co-sponsored by an association. This 
includes pre-conference workshops.

Considering that LC has some 4,700 employ­
ees this means that very few people attend con­
ferences. Last year thirty-one librarians went 
to ALA in New York, three went to ASIS in At­
lanta, two went to the Association for the Study 
of Afro-American Life and History in Philadel­
phia, one to the Gerontological Society in Port­
land, Oregon, etc. The Processing Department 
(MARC, CONSER, NUC) got a total of $15,- 
000 for meetings. Congressional Research Ser­
vice got $15,000. In  all, about 200 trips were 
made outside the Washington, D.C. area at an 
average cost of $280.

Members of the Appropriations Committee 
suggested to Lorenz that they simply raise the 
amount of money available for attendance at 
meetings. After all, they argued, if a substantial 
part of the library’s $455,000 travel budget was 
available for meetings, wouldn’t  this solve the 
problem?

Of course it would for the moment. But the 
wording in the law perpetuates the antiquated 
notion that the Library of Congress is just an­
other big reference library in Washington. Its 
staff should stay at their desks cataloging books 
and answering research questions. No junketing 
allowed.

But participating on a panel to discuss com­
puterizing catalogs is not a junket. Even if it 
isn’t Chicago in January.

Stimulating new thinking and sharing new 
ideas with members of the library profession 
is the business of LC. By removing this artifi­
cial limit on the amount of money library staff 
can spend attending professional meetings and 
communicating new knowledge, Congress can 
show it appreciates the role its library is play­
ing in the development of libraries and infor­
mation science in this country. ■ ■