“Carla, on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” wrote Trent Morse, deputy director of presidential personnel on the White Home.
White Home Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later defined that Hayden, who was the primary lady, Black individual and professionally skilled librarian to supervise the Library of Congress, had executed “quite concerning things,” on the job, together with “putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”
Democratic politicians sharply criticized Hayden’s termination, saying the firing was unjust. It was truly about Trump punishing civil servants “who don’t bend to his every will,” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer stated.
An data science scholar, I’ve written extensively in regards to the historical past of libraries and archives, together with the Library of Congress. To completely perceive the function Hayden performed for the previous 9 years, I believe it is very important perceive what the Library of Congress does, and the ignored and underappreciated function it has performed in American life.
Carla Hayden, the lately fired librarian of Congress, attends an occasion in March 2025 in Washington.
Shannon Finney/Getty Pictures
The Library of Congress’ work
The Library of Congress is an company that was first established, by an act of Congress, in 1800. The act offered for “the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress at the said city of Washington, and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them.” Its chief librarian is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
The library has six buildings in Washington that maintain a print and on-line assortment of practically 26 million books, in addition to greater than 136 million different gadgets, together with manuscripts, maps, sheet music and prints and pictures.
It additionally homes historic paperwork, like Thomas Jefferson’s tough draft of the Declaration of Independence and James Madison’s notes on the 1787 Constitutional Conference.
The library is the property of the American individuals. Anybody over the age of 16 with a government-issued photograph identification can enter its buildings and skim or view its supplies on-site. The Library of Congress was partially designed as a analysis establishment to go well with the wants of members of Congress, and solely Congress members can borrow gadgets from the library and take them residence.
The Library of Congress has an annual price range of about US$900 million, with a workers of three,263. In 2024, the library’s workers helped purchase 1,437,832 million new gadgets, situation practically 69,000 library playing cards and reply greater than 764,000 reference requests, amongst different duties.
The library’s deep roots
The library has advanced alongside the U.S. itself. 5 years earlier than the Constitutional Conference of 1787, future president James Madison known as for a library to offer supplies to assist inform Congress and its members. In 1800, President John Adams signed a invoice that established the establishment, which started with a $5,000 authorities appropriation, equal to greater than $127,000 in the present day.
The library’s first assortment included 152 works in 740 volumes imported from England. It occupied an area in a Washington Senate workplace that measured simply 22 ft by 34 ft.
The British military torched the toddler library and its assortment that had grown to three,000 books in 1814, in the course of the Warfare of 1812. In response, former president Thomas Jefferson offered his private assortment of 6,479 books to the library, which he known as “unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the U.S.”
Tragedy struck once more in 1851, with a hearth that incinerated two-thirds of the library’s 55,000 volumes, together with most of Jefferson’s private assortment.
The group rebounded within the subsequent few years, because it bought the 40,000-volume Smithsonian library in 1866, amongst different new acquisitions.
A rising place in American life
As its collections burgeoned in each scale and scope within the latter a part of the nineteenth century, the library assumed an more and more seen function and have become identified by some as “the nation’s library.” By 1900, it had practically 1 million printed books and different supplies.
The opening of a brand new library constructing in 1897, providing companies to blind individuals with a chosen studying room containing 500 raised character – or braille – books and music gadgets, epitomized the library’s new standing.
President Theodore Roosevelt stated in 1901 that the library was “the one national library of the United States” and that was “a unique opportunity to render to the libraries of this country – to American scholarship – service of the highest importance.”
The library’s work, and world strategy, continued to develop in the course of the twentieth century.
By the late 1900s, the library held supplies in additional than 450 languages.
It continued so as to add outstanding gadgets to its assortment, together with a Gutenberg Bible, the primary ebook printed in Europe from movable metallic sort, a sort of printing know-how, in 1455.
Documenting the evolution of democracy, the library additionally assumed stewardship of 23 presidents’ official papers, from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, throughout this timeframe.
A public service
Whereas primarily designated a analysis establishment for Congress, the library has additionally catered to a various vary of patrons, together with by mail and phone.
As one Science Digest author famous in 1960, reference workers members fielded questions starting from “What was the color of a mastodon’s eye?” to “How many words are there in the English language?” and “Could you suggest a name for twins?”
Within the late twentieth century, the library centered on a brand new democratic nationwide and worldwide mission, because it embraced a brand new function. Daniel Boorstin, the librarian from 1975 to 1987, termed that function a “multimedia encyclopedia.”
A congressional decision marking the Library of Congress’s bicentennial in 2000 famous that it was “the largest and most inclusive library in human history,” because it digitized its collections to increase its attain nonetheless additional with the expansion of the web.
Because the library marks its 225th 12 months, it continues to symbolize, as David Mearns, chief of the library’s manuscript division, stated in 1947, “the American story.”
The Thomas Jefferson Constructing of the Library of Congress is seen on June 11, 2025, in Washington.
Kevin Carter/Getty Pictures
A library for all
Hayden has contended that her dismissal, which occurred alongside different firings of prime civil servants, together with the nationwide archivist, represents a broad menace to individuals’s proper to simply entry free data.
“Democracies are not to be taken for granted,” Hayden stated in June. She defined in an interview with CBS that she by no means had an issue with a presidential administration and isn’t certain why she was dismissed.
“And the institutions that support democracy should not be taken for granted,” Hayden added.
In her remaining annual report as librarian, Hayden characterised the establishment as “truly, a library for all.” Up to now, even with out her management, it stays simply that.
