Farewell!

This post is written by Jacob Nadal, Director for Preservation at the Library of Congress. His last day with the Library is October 18, 2024, we wish him well on his new adventures.

I’ll be stepping down soon, after seven years of government service, to become the next President at the Center for Research Libraries. I’m excited for the new opportunity, a chance to lead an organization that has an important role to play, but even so, Director for Preservation at the Library of Congress is a hard job to say farewell to. It’s an honor to be the director for such an exceptional group of staff, and a privilege to care for the Library’s unrivalled collection of our cultural and intellectual heritage.  

There is easily a book’s worth of reflections I could offer on the preservation work of the Library and the experiences I’ve had here. But in this post, I want to reflect on the most important things I’ve seen in my time in the director’s chair. 

GOVERNMENT MATTERS

This is not the Library of Congress in name only. Our relationship to Congress permeates the work here. Sometimes that’s as obvious as Congress.gov and the Congressional Research Service. For Preservation, it’s more often heard in the quiet backbeat of government: questions from staffers drafting language or fielding a reference referral from a constituent with family photos to care for.  

My favorite “only at the Library of Congress” scene, though, comes along every two years when we swear in new members. One of my cherished assignments was making sure we had a ready-to-deploy collection of texts for members to swear-in upon, with guidelines and procedures for special requests that have ranged from bibles with special associative value to Wonder Woman’s first appearance in print.  

I also had two opportunities to represent the Library on two Congressionally created bodies: the U.S. Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee (CHCC) and the U.S. Semi-quincentennial Commission (USSC). Those experiences meant a great deal to me on two levels. One was the work that we were charged to do: developing our national policies and programs for care of cultural property abroad in the CHCC, and planning for the commemorative activities and celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the USSC (better known as America250).  

The other was the chance to satisfy an interest and fulfill an aspiration that ran beneath the surface for the whole course of my career. My interest in Congress is thanks to a bit of happenstance from my first job in preservation at Indiana University (IU). We had just opened the new E. Lingle Craig Preservation Laboratory. The lab included an intentionally windowless room, painted in a carefully nondescript shade of gray, to be a photo-documentation studio.  

We didn’t have the photography equipment yet; IU had acquired the papers of Representative Lee Hamilton and Senator Birch Bayh; we needed room to process them. So, we hosted an archivist and Congressional historian, whose small talk about politics, process, and service to the country made a big impression on me. It’s a real point of satisfaction that twenty years on, I’ve had the chance to do my own part of the business of Congress and country.  

HIGH QUALITY PROBLEMS

Over the past seven years, we’ve been getting to the crux of persistent challenges and turning them into problems we can solve. Sometimes that has come from adopting technologies into our work, like automating book sortation or using fast, portable, and non-invasive scientific instruments for analysis. We’re at a moment where we can offer scientific analysis more or less as an on-demand reference service. Sometimes that has involved trying out different methodologies to evaluate the costs of our work or the processes we use. It’s exciting when the work someone once spent days on now takes an hour, and that very same person now has days to spend on something more engaging.  

We’ve made some progress by adapting models from professional sectors outside of libraries and government, too. Although it takes careful thinking and tolerance for false starts, once we figure out how a model from a different industry can map to our work, the change of perspective often lets us crack the code on a stubborn problem.  

That still leaves a lot of work on the table. It’s a big library and we don’t get any special exemption from the laws of either Murphy or thermodynamics. Over the past seven years, though, I’m happy to say that we elevated the quality of all the problems we’re working on. A large part of success in preservation administration comes from turning one large mess into two medium-sized problems, and then rallying people to solve them. 

ORG-CHART UPSIDE DOWN

I am a firm believer that the principal job of managers is to build a good foundation for staff to stand on, something I refer to as “org (organization) chart upside down.” With that in place, the value upper management and senior leadership provide is the wider, longer field of view that our position and experience give us. It is always staff that makes things happen, though, who figure out how to do each step, in detail.  

It takes a lot of trust to work this way. It takes talent and competence across the team. It is easy to stall when you realize you don’t have the trust you need, or the skills you need, and it is easy to forget to say “yet” at the end of those sentiments. I have been fortunate that a lot of people around me in the Library extended some trust and put in the time and effort to make possibilities into present tense practices. 

This relates to one of the most important, and most universal, lessons I’ve learned as a leader here. Get people focused on their customers. Even if you share my org-chart upside down mindset, learning how to put it into practice can be confounding. If you can help someone figure out who really cares about their work and put a name to the person who depends on them, I find the path usually becomes clear.  

PRESERVATION IN THE PRESENT

The last thing I want to remark on, probably the biggest change I can hang my name on, is that we’ve started to emphasize that preservation happens in the present at the Library of Congress.  

It is almost a reflex to say that preservation is for the future generations. That’s not false. Preservation is shouldered or shirked in the present, however. And the world needs a lot of repairs, so in practical and compassionate terms, if we are going to invest in care of artifacts, that work must be done here and now.  

I’m proud of what we’ve done to make our preservation efforts open to an audience. That includes some things you’d guess at: blog posts and public events, tours and talks. That spirit of openness is pervasive, though, and that’s the difference. It’s internships and fellowships that bring people into the profession. It’s conversations with colleagues across the Library to plan the future of the collection together. It’s the Library’s cooperation with colleagues with Security and Emergency Preparedness, the Capitol Police, and the Architect of the Capitol to find a way to safely welcome millions to new galleries and still keep the temperature where it needs to be.  

As I sign off, I hope you will all stay tuned in to the Library’s preservation activities. The work already in progress is exciting and the capacity of this team of people is exceptional. I am going to miss working with this group day to day. I hope you’ll join me in subscribing to the blog and being a good Friend of the Library of Congress.