Dr. Carla Hayden
Dr. Carla Hayden offers hope through the historical insights, critical services, and numerous opportunities that libraries provide us. She is the 14th Librarian of Congress, where she’s been developing new programs and expanding access to the LOC’s vast collection. Keep up-to-date with the Library of Congress at www.loc.gov.
Transcript
Carla Hayden:
Well, there's hope in history we say, and if you understand what led up to where we are now, for instance, and what might be in the future, it might give you context and deeper understanding so that you can make hopefully some informed decisions.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Today I'm joined by Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress and the first woman and African-American to hold the esteemed position as the head of the largest library in the world. Carla Hayden has transformed the institution, expanding digital access, hosting public events, and creating a new children's center. In our conversation, she discusses the evolving role of libraries as vital community hubs, and she describes how Lizzo brought new life to a 200 year old crystal flute proving that history isn't just about the past, it's about how we keep it alive today. I'm honored to share with you this conversation, so let's get started.
Carla, thank you for joining us. It's such a pleasure to have you on this podcast.
Carla Hayden:
This is wonderful. I can't wait to talk with you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
My sense is a lot of people know of the Library of Congress, but maybe don't know what the Library of Congress really is and how broad a scope it has.
Carla Hayden:
And that's not unusual, and we're working on making sure more people know about what the Library of Congress has and also where it fits in terms of the cultural and educational institutions in Washington. The Library of Congress is the oldest---we'd like to say the first---cultural institution in the United States, and that really accelerated in 1870 when the Library of Congress became the administrator of the US Copyright System. It's also the People's Library as well. It serves Congress and the people Congress serves.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Which I think may a common misperception about the Library of Congress---or I'm curious if it is--- is that yes, it's a reference source for Congress, but it is a library for the people. Anybody can walk into the Library of Congress and access the resources there.
Carla Hayden:
It's free for everyone. The only people who can check out materials are members of Congress and their staff. However, at 16, you can get a reader's card and have access to materials in the collection. Some materials are more restrictive because of the nature of the materials---original letters from Lincoln---but we are the People's Library, and so you can come in and do research, you can look into things, and one of the people who uses and has used the Library of Congress extensively and talks about it is the filmmaker Ken Burns.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm sure.
Carla Hayden:
So it's not unusual to see in the reading room Ken Burns and his crew photographing and filming original documents to use in just about every documentary that he has completed. I think people would be surprised that the people who have their papers here, not only 23 presidents from Washington to Coolidge, 38 Supreme Court Justices---Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thurgood Marshall, most recently, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Brader Ginsburg and Justice Stevens--- and people that you know about: the Rosa Parks papers where she in her own hand, talks about what it felt like to be in prison, but also on a lighter side, her recipe for peanut butter pancakes. And we put that up with our collection of historic cookbooks and recipes. We have one of the largest collections---you kind of get tired of saying "we have the largest collection of," but that's what happens.
Ted Roosevelt V:
How many items are added to the Library of Congress in a given?
Carla Hayden:
Typically we'll add in per week about 15 to 20,000 items.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's amazing.
Carla Hayden:
And quite a few are coming in through the copyright system, but also purchase and gifts. What people might not realize is that over half of the library's collection is in languages other than English. The Library of Congress collects in 470 languages, so it's a national library with a worldwide and international scope because as Thomas Jefferson famously said, there is no topic to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer. Thomas Jefferson at the time---1814---had the largest personal library in the United States.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Oh my God, I didn't know that.
Carla Hayden:
He had books on so many subjects beyond law. He had poetry books. He had a Koran. There was a little controversy in Congress about accepting this collection because it was expansive, and that's when he made that statement. And so that was also the start of a recognition that the Library for Congress, the reference library for Congress, needed to be comprehensive.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I can see how passionate you are about the resources of the Library of Congress. I'm wondering if there are things that you have come across that sort of personally sung to you in the Library of Congress that you hadn't expected to find when you took over this job in 2016.
Carla Hayden:
Well, mainly objects from history. And the one, because I grew up spending summers in Springfield, Illinois---my family is basically from Illinois---to see the contents of Abraham Lincoln's pockets the night he was assassinated. To see that he had two pairs of spectacles, a fob, key chain fob that just came off of the watch chain and he just put it in his pocket. It humanizes him so, to see his reading copy of the Gettysburg address and see where it was folded. And you could tell that all of these types of things I didn't really expect. And of course, things like hair---I've seen locks of Thomas Jefferson's hair, one of three certified locks of Beethoven's hair. So we're going to do an exhibit on hair, actually.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Oh my gosh.
Carla Hayden:
You know, that we have all of these interesting things, but you wouldn't know. When you think library, you think books.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You've referenced a lot of the writings in people's own hand and the idea of humanizing these historical characters. Why do you think that's important? I mean, what is the power in that?
Carla Hayden:
The power, and I heard one historian talk about it: Scott Berg, in fact, who's doing in fact a book about Thurgood Marshall right now. And we see him quite often, but he's also done other biographies. And he mentioned that when you see, for instance, Frederick Douglas's description of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and he crosses out very strongly on the paper, he was killed. He was murdered because of people of color.
You sense, it's like it's going through the arm. You can get a sense of that person because this was attached to them. This is really the power of seeing that. And when you see the declaration, the draft of the Declaration of Independence, and we'll be bringing that out for America 250-- Thomas Jefferson writing these wonderful things. But then you see BF for Benjamin Franklin on the side, he's making his edit. JA, John---
Ted Roosevelt V:
Oh, that's amazing.
Carla Hayden:
John Adams, and then the cross out of the word "subjects" and inserting "citizens." And you know, that was a work in progress and so was the country. So it gives people a historic perspective as well, and that there's a process to creativity, to democracy that there are drafts.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I mean, maybe just for, let's widen the aperture for a second. How much of the library of Congress is digitized and then how much of Theodore Roosevelt is digitized? I know it's a huge amount already.
Carla Hayden:
Thousands, frankly. There are different aspects of digitization of materials at the library. Mainly we're digitizing unique items. For instance, Teddy Roosevelt's diary, when it has "February 14th, the light has gone out of my life." We finally digitized that and we really put an emphasis on manuscript collections like that, things that are unique, some of the maps that we have. I would say of 178 million items, possibly about 61 million items have been digitized so far.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I had a great experience in the Library of Congress a few years back. You mentioned the famous page with the X from TR's diary where he says, the light has gone out of my life. That was really all I'd known about his writing from that tragic period. He'd lost both his wife and his mother on the same day on Valentine's Day.
Carla Hayden:
Valentine's Day in the same house.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Same house. Just a crushing moment for him. But what was really surprising to me when we got the diary out and we were able to go through it was the subsequent two pages where he talked about the passage of his wife, the passage of his mother, and then the christening of his daughter, his first child, Alice. And he writes after that, "for joy or for sorrow, my life has now been lived out." It was this very profound moment for me to expand out my understanding of that moment that he had experienced. And it strikes me that the ability to read the entirety, and not that I went through the diary, but just expanded a little bit, helped me really understand that moment much more substantively. And I'm curious how you think about the role of information being online where sometimes it points you in a specific direction versus the ability to kind of sit down and go through the entirety of a document.
Carla Hayden:
And that's what's so wonderful and important about being able to digitize the entire diary or digitize all of the letters or all of the correspondence of a person so that you can see not only what they wrote, but then the person that responded, what did they write? One thing that breaks the heart of so many of us in history is the fact if you go to Mount Vernon and there's a wonderful exhibit, and you see at the last part the recreation of Martha Washington putting the letters of George Washington and her letters into a fire, you're thinking, oh my gosh. But she didn't want that exposure. And so some of the things and some of the fact the papers that we get have time limits of when they can be released.
Ted Roosevelt V:
In so many ways, these stories humanize our leaders, which is so important for people to understand.
Carla Hayden:
And to have inspiration, Ted too, because we hold these people up as just, they're almost gods. And you could never do that. But for a young person to realize that, for instance, Leonard Bernstein---we had young people from Baltimore come over and the part that they love was to see that he got Cs and Ds on his report card, and they love that because here we're being bussed over here, this famous man, but look, he got Cs and Ds! And so making people who are icons relatable is also part of it. Rosa Parks, when she writes about being 10 years old and wanting to go hit this young man who said something to her, and her grandmother said, you got to control your anger. You never think of Rosa Parks wanting to hit somebody. So that type of thing. And then Carl Sagan at 12, his drawing on note paper of what a space traveler would look like. So that's why we're opening up a new center, The Source, for young people that's going to really bring these things to light so they can see: here's what Carl Sagan thought. So, what do you think?
Ted Roosevelt V:
It seems like one of the roles that the Library of Congress plays is fostering a connection between past and present. Why is that so important?
Carla Hayden:
Well, there's hope in history we say, and if you understand what led up to where we are now, for instance, and what might be in the future, it might give you context and deeper understanding so that you can make hopefully some informed decisions. And that was the whole point of public libraries and having an informed citizenry and establishing and having institutions that help people gain an understanding.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One of the things that the Library of Congress is doing that I think is so powerful is that it is the keeper of our nation's stories in so many ways. In addition to just humanizing these people, why are our country's stories so fundamentally important to the nation?
Carla Hayden:
A project that the Library of Congress started decades ago really helps give context to all of the, for instance, engagement--- military engagements. We have, the Veterans History Project. They're oral histories of veterans of different wars that are telling their own stories. And you can read about World War II and the Korean War, but to hear an actual veteran talk about it puts it in a different framework and gives a fuller picture of history. And telling stories from different perspectives, not just the generals. We have General Patton, we have Eisenhower, we have that, but how about the infantry person who was reluctant to tell his story because, and of course, a woman too, first female helicopter pilot.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Sure.
Carla Hayden:
So those types of ways to get at history: through the individuals, through communities, and through the perspective of historians who are looking at the entire aspect or area.
Ted Roosevelt V:
One of the things you've done, I think a phenomenal job at doing and I would imagine is sort of an ongoing challenge, is connecting this information to the American people, making sure that they know that they have access to it, that this is a resource. Increasingly people are getting their information on the internet, and some of that information is good information, some of it's not so great information, but you've relied on popular culture to bring some attention to this.
Carla Hayden:
Oh my goodness, yes. And using social media, for instance. We had the entertainer Lizzo play James Madison's crystal flute right in our reading room. That got a lot of attention because the Library of Congress has the largest collection of a single instrument in the world, and it's the flute. So one of our young people in the music department knew about Ms. Lizzo. She was in town for concert, and they said, let's tag her to invite her to come and look at the collection. And she spent three hours in the vault and then told people at her concert, "History is cool."
Ted Roosevelt V:
That is so great. And it's exactly what libraries need for people to see them as vibrant living spaces, not just old book repositories. Which reminds me of something that we discuss on this podcast a lot, and that's the decline of third spaces in our community as civic engagement wanes and church attendance has fallen, for instance, libraries have begun to fill that function. What's your perspective on the emergence of libraries as community gathering spaces?
Carla Hayden:
Public libraries in particular have been filling those spaces for a number of years and have really been, I think champions of saying that libraries are community spaces. They have, for instance, maker spaces, computer centers, they circulate musical instruments. They circulate actual tools for people to use. So it's beyond books because you're going to see teens doing things. You're going to see seniors learning how to use computers, you're going to see people registering to vote, getting their groceries. All types of things are happening in public libraries now. So they are that safe space and also a trusted source of information. There are challenges now that are real because libraries are still, I have to just say, they're still proponents of making sure that as many points of view are available to people, and sometimes that is disturbing to some people. We used to say before the digital age, let the books battle it out on the shelves, but you are free to choose and to find out for yourself. Here it is, you read it, you look at it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I mean, how do libraries manage that in this modern era, that challenge of remaining a trusted source of information when a lot of information has been politicized one way or another.
Carla Hayden:
It's really an extension of what we used to learn in library school. It was "consider the source." Where do you get health information? Okay, the National Library of Medicine, or here are the websites that are vetted. And so that has extended into the digital realm is where is this information coming from? Who is providing it? Information literacy is a term that we use and teaching young people at an early age to look at where the information is coming from. What is a trusted source? Who would you trust?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to come back to the library as a third space because you had a really interesting moment when you were in Baltimore following Freddie Gray's death, and you decided to keep the libraries open during a period of unrest in Baltimore. I'd love to hear you explain how that decision came to be and why you came to that decision.
Carla Hayden:
And it was also a decision made not that long after a decision was made in Ferguson, Missouri. A librarian there decided to have the library, public library open and to become a community center at a time that the community was going through quite a bit. And so when it unfortunately came time for the library in Baltimore to have to decide, will we open the day after, the branch library was directly across from where a building had been burned, and it was all on television, people could see it, and we were concerned that the library would be part of that. And the people in the community though protected the library, and we decided that we were that access point for the community to get on computers, to have access to even a restroom or a place--- our meeting room became a place where people could get groceries delivered and all types of things. Classes were being able to be held. And so we opened the next day and there were people lined up and one young man said, thank you so much. I needed to apply for a job and I needed your computer. And he came back a couple of days later and said he got an interview. So we were that place and soon we were also the place for the media because things were closed, there weren't public restrooms, anything. It was quite a time.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That story speaks volumes about the importance of a library to a community. And I wonder for those libraries that don't have the ability to get Lizzo to come in and play a flute, what can they do to create awareness of the value of these spaces?
Carla Hayden:
Well, the Library of Congress for instance, is reaching out to the public libraries and school libraries and making sure that when we have a Jason Reynolds for instance, they're able to tune in and be part of the virtual conversation and you'll have a kid in Albuquerque and that. And so partnering with others is something that quite a few of the public libraries are doing so that they have joint programming, that they become the place for certain things happening in communities. That's one of the strongest things. For instance, quite a few of the libraries have a program called "Paws (PAWS) to Read," where they partner with their local humane society to bring in dogs that young people can read to because they're nonjudgmental and the best dogs are golden retrievers. But you partner with these other institutions and organizations and also with museums and other cultural institutions, and you can have a concert at a library, especially if you have, for instance, school schools of music. Those students need to practice. They need to give recitals. So opening up the library doors to other partners like that really can expand what you can offer.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Carla, you have a 10 year term, and you started your term in 2016, so we're getting close to the end of your first term. I know there's the possibility of a second term. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, but in the next 14 months, what do you want to accomplish for the Library of Congress?
Carla Hayden:
We're working on---I mentioned the youth center that will be opening and what will be happening is that will open in the spring of 2025 and then after that for the first time, an orientation center in the iconic Thomas Jefferson building. So being able to have an orientation center open that will give people a sense of what the library is and what it can do for them will be wonderful to have. We just opened our first ever permanent treasures gallery in June, so that was the first part of this multi-year visitor experience project. So that's what I'll be working on, and I've got some great people working with me and it's pretty exciting.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's so great. We ask everybody on this podcast one question, and I'm very curious to hear your answer. The name of the podcast is Good Citizen, and I'm curious what you think it means to be a good citizen?
Carla Hayden:
A good citizen would be someone who tries to understand what is going on in their own community and the larger world around them and what's happening in that larger world that affects the community that they're in. To be aware and to think about, oh, the ripple effects of different things that are happening, and also to try to contribute to their community in whatever way they can. Everyone can't be a particular thing over here or that, but what can you do? And you could put up a little library in your front yard or you could help with recycling or you could volunteer. So that's what I think a good citizen, someone that is aware.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Carla, thank you so much. You are a steward of a---maybe the most important cultural institution we have. You've done an amazing job at it, and it has been really insightful and interesting to chat with you about it. So thank you for joining us today.
Carla Hayden:
Thank you for having me,
Ted Roosevelt V:
Carla, thank you so much for sharing this time with me. Your body of work is inspiring and we're lucky to have you at the helm of our nation's library. You've done an outstanding job of making history accessible and relevant to all Americans, and I'm glad you could join us to share some of your stories. Listeners, be sure to put the Library of Congress on your must visit list and don't keep this episode to yourself. Please help us reach more people by sharing the podcast with your network. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of Storytelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.