Talk:Library of Congress/Definition

Roles

First, the Congressional Research Service is not the only organization that does analysis for Congress and reports to it. The General Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office do substantial work; GAO has some level of independence even from Congress.

As far as national roles, the LoC is the U.S. cataloging authority for materials other than in medicine and agriculture, for which there are formal national libraries (National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland; National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland). By having the Copyright Office as one of its components, combined with the Cataloging in Publishing pre-cataloging service arranged with major publishers, it has a very major impact on worldwide publishing practice. Machine-readable cataloging was first implemented in the MARC Development Office, for which I worked before the assorted computing offices were consolidated and I became the network architect for the Library. For the record, this is very firsthand knowledge; I was an employee for over three years, and had special access research privileges for a number of years before that (when stack passes were still issued).

Howard C. Berkowitz 01:32, 17 August 2008 (CDT)