The Case for #DraftBrewster
Earlier this year, James Billington, the 13th Librarian of Congress, announced that he intended to retire from the position in 2016, after serving nearly 30 years. (He has since retired ahead of that schedule.)
Naturally, talk has raged from many circles over who would be the next Librarian of Congress, an appointed position with an open-ended term.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this came a simple call:
Brewster, it must be said, is my boss at the Internet Archive, where I work as a “free-range archivist”, travelling and helping to usher in data and materials for the Archive’s petabytes of storage, and being an outreach for the many amazing realms of culture and communication our worlds have to offer. It’s a fuzzy, open-ended job position, hard to find anywhere else, and I adore every single minute of it.
Peppered throughout the Archive’s existence are the dual themes of visionary experimentation and whimsy. Housed in a renovated church, thousands of terabytes are served up to millions of daily visitors, while nearby, over one hundred small statues of employees regard the proceedings silently (and cheerfully, based on their expressions.) Experiments with currency, housing and education have happened within the walls of this building, while advancements and experiments in technology have kept the site growing steadily and available, even with an open-ended mission and the weight of the Net crushing down.
Unquestionably, the Wayback Machine is the Archive’s most visible part and one of the Internet’s core foundations, providing almost two decades of web history for education, verification, patent-busting and entertainment. When it goes down for any maintenance at all, the Web gets amnesia; you can see the tweets decrying its absence. In many cases, the servers of the Wayback house the only evidence of events and sites long gone and with no other presence. This, you would think, would have been the exact and direct sort of service provided by a modern Library of Congress — but it simply isn’t. (Make no mistake, the LoC captures some amount of the web — but the move to make it available, worldwide and focused on ease of access, hasn’t happened.)
I’ve worked with Brewster, up close, for years now. I’ve pitched what I thought were expansive ideas and then heard his responses and realized I wasn’t even in the realm of big thoughts. The Archive takes great leaps, and wild tries, and does so with a joy that pervades throughout its ranks. Under Brewster’s leadership, it has an influence and reputation far outstripping similar organizations and much-larger companies, and it does it at a bargain cost.
With Dr. Billington’s retirement, the Library of Congress has had to re-evaluate its future, and the country has turned to the consideration of who will lead the Library, and in some ways, it does so at a great disadvantage.
If you look around for opinions on how the Library of Congress has been doing for the last 30 years, you’re going to find there are two general camps: Just Ducky, and Whatever.
The Just Ducky crowd is simply happy that the country even maintains a library at all. Funding has dried up in general for public libraries. Questions about how to define what a library (or a Library of Congress) even means anymore are a little too boat-rocking when even vital physical (as opposed to mental) infrastructure is being shortchanged.
The Whatever viewpoint rolls into not even being completely aware of what the Library of Congress does on a given day, where its influence is felt, and how the daily lives of Americans get touched by the Library’s priorities. Grab the attention of a person on the street, ask them what the Department of Defense, IRS, FDA, EPA and Library of Congress does, and that last question is going to be ridiculously variant. Is it a warehouse? A gallery? A house of knowledge and learning?
Into this swirling of uncertainty, then, comes the candidates, a short list of people who might step in for the next Librarian. (and I rush to say that my colleague Jessamyn West has an excellent site weighing in on that subject).
And I contend that, in the short term, the Library needs more than just another leader in that position.
It needs a Colonic.
If the rampant erosion of access, fair use, and innovation in the public sphere is to be halted (or at least slowed), a visionary is what the Library needs. Brewster is that visionary — he will ask the questions that need to be asked, shake up the accepted norms, and make the case for bodily dragging what should be a national treasure into a new era.
Do I think that Brewster, were he appointed, would settle in for another 30 year run? No, I really don’t. I think he’ll serve a shorter term, be the wake-up call and eye-opener the endeavor needs at the helm, and then, having done what is needed to get the ship on a better course, return to the city he’s adopted as his home. I see it not as his being given some sort of cushy government job in the bowels of process, but an honor and a duty to perform in the service of an informed, aware public who will find a new admiration for this Library that has grown up aside the country, these past couple of centuries.
Complacency and coasting, you see, are not in the guy’s vocabulary.
This shorter term, frankly, works for me personally — the Internet Archive, touching as it does the millions of lives every day, will be a less vibrant, less happy place without Brewster within its walls.
But, like a very good book or a beloved piece of art, you have to lend something (or someone) out to share the knowledge, joy and vision with the world, and not hoard it away.
So that’s why I am supporting the #draftbrewster idea — even if it means I’m going to see a lot less of him as a result. The country, and its citizens, deserves him in the seat of the Librarian of Congress.
Thanks.
