On March 18, 2025, the Bodleian Libraries invited representatives from the United States Library of Congress to the Weston Library in celebration of 10 years of the Weston Library and the 175th anniversary of the Public Libraries Act. As an American working at the Weston, I was excited for the opportunity to hear some familiar accents and learn more about how the national library of the U.S. was both coping with and responding to great political upheaval.
The impact of the aforementioned upheaval was immediately apparent on the day: Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, was due to speak to Bodleian and Oxfordshire County Council Library staff in the morning, but had to remain in D.C. due to the shifting political situation. Roswell Encina, the Chief Communications Officer of the Library, spoke in her place. Encina discussed the “balancing act” required to ensure the Library fulfils its obligations as both the library and research service for Congress and as a library for the American people. He highlighted the ‘Library for You’ campaign that has sought to make the Library more inviting and accessible for the public through both in-person events and exhibitions and digital and crowdsourced projects.
The audience was particularly interested in hearing about how the Library is handling the targeting of libraries in “culture wars,” such as calls for libraries to ban books telling LGBTQ+ and Black American stories―a phenomenon that is also growing in the U.K. Encina spoke about the need to let “books battle it out on the shelves,” rather than restricting what books people have access to. He also highlighted the role of libraries in the fight against “innovative” misinformation by making resources accessible and teaching information literacy, as well as by upholding citation standards and “fixing” information by providing access to persistent identifiers, such as DOIs.
Additionally, Encina spoke about the relationships the Library is trying to build with other libraries and archives globally, including a collaborative exhibition with the Royal Archives in celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the U.S. Also a part of this conversation, he mentioned an effort by the Library of Congress to digitize all public domain Haitian legal publications (see p.969) following the devastating earthquake in 2010 that wiped out the country’s parliamentary library. This struck me amidst the news breaking about cuts to USAID. As a nonpartisan entity, I wonder, would the Library of Congress have the political capital (or resources) to do something like this again in a time of growing American isolationism? Encina seemed hopeful.
In the evening, Dr. Hayden virtually joined a panel alongside Encina, Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden, and other library leaders from the U.K.―Amina Shah, the National Librarian of Scotland, and Neil MacInnes, the Head of Libraries for Manchester City Council. In her keynote, Hayden spoke about libraries having a “central role in protecting civil liberties” by providing access to resources and information, as well as the ways that libraries have extended their service provisions to meet broadening user needs.
The panelists’ conversation highlighted the advocacy skills needed to challenge outdated notions of what a library is and does, especially to political leaders and funders. This came on the back of a March 14 executive order from the Trump administration that mandated the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent federal agency that is a major source of grant funding for libraries in the U.S. (All IMLS staff have now been placed on administrative leave.) An audience member challenged the panelists with the question of what they would say to Prime Minister Keir Starmer or President Donald Trump, were they present at the discussion. Dr. Hayden succinctly responded, “Be open-minded about the impact of libraries.”
The conversations about preserving access to information caused me to reflect on my own work. Part of what I do as a graduate trainee digital archivist is manage the Bodleian Libraries Web Archive. Just a few weeks after the Trump administration took power on January 20, 2025, changes to U.S. government websites to remove so-called “woke” language and deletions of entire pages hit the headlines. This is continuing to happen as the Trump administration recently altered the government’s COVID website, which originally provided public health information but now promotes the argument that the virus spread due to a “lab leak” (this theory is unproven). No U.S. government sites are in scope for the BLWA (though many are for the Internet Archive), but this was an important reminder of the challenge of digital decay of the internet, and how it is sometimes deliberate and harmful. The BLWA preserves at least one corner of the internet, and I hope it proves useful to future researchers when so much else of the web is likely to be lost. As a trainee (and future) archivist, I hope I can play a small role in making information accessible when it is clearly under attack.
By Lilly Wilcox
