James Hadley Billington (June 1, 1929 – November 20, 2018) was an American academic and author who taught history at Harvard and Princeton before serving for 42 years as CEO of four federal cultural institutions. He served as the 13th Librarian of Congress after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, and his appointment was approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate. He retired as Librarian on September 30, 2015.
Life Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Billington was educated in Philadelphia-area public schools. He was class valedictorian at both Lower Merion High School and Princeton University, where he graduated with highest honors and an A.B. in history in 1950 after completing a senior thesis titled "Nicholas Berdyaev." Three years later, he earned his doctorate in Russian history from Balliol College of the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and student of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Following service with the U.S. Army and the Office of National Estimates, he taught history at Harvard University from 1957 to 1962 and subsequently at Princeton University, where he was a professor of history from 1964 to 1974.
From 1973 to 1987, Billington was director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the nation's official memorial in Washington, D.C., to America's 28th president. As director, he founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the center, and seven other new programs, as well as the Wilson Quarterly.
Billington was married to the former Marjorie Anne Brennan. They had four children: Susan Billington Harper, Anne Billington Fischer, the Rev. James Hadley Billington Jr., and Thomas Keator Billington, as well as 12 grandchildren. Billington and his daughter Susan were the first father and daughter to both be awarded Rhodes Scholarships and to use them to earn Doctorates of Philosophy at Oxford University.
Library of Congress
Billington was sworn in as the Librarian of Congress on September 14, 1987. He was the 13th person to hold the position since the Library of Congress was established in 1800. He was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and his appointment was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.
During his tenure at the Library of Congress, Billington doubled the size of the Library's traditional analog collections, from 85.5 million items in 1987 to more than 160 million items in 2014. He led the acquisition of Lafayette's previously inaccessible papers in 1996 from Château de la Grange-Bléneau in France. Billington has since been the only non-Frenchman on the board of the foundation governing the castle. He also acquired the only copy of the 1507 Waldseemüller world map ("America's birth certificate") in 2003 for permanent display in the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building.
Billington pioneered the reconstruction, using privately raised funds, of Thomas Jefferson's original library, which was placed on permanent display in the Jefferson building in 2008. He enlarged and technologically enhanced public spaces of the Jefferson Building into a national exhibition venue, and hosted over 100 exhibitions, most featuring materials not previously displayed publicly in the United States. These included exhibits on the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, several on the Civil War and Lincoln, on African-American culture, on Religion and the founding of the American Republic, the Early Americas (the Kislak Collection is now on permanent display), and the global celebration commemorating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, and on early American printing featuring the Rubenstein Bay Psalm Book. Billington also advocated successfully for an underground connection between the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center and the Library in 2008 to increase congressional usage and public tours of the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building.
Billington launched a mass deacidification program in 2001, which has extended the lifespan of almost 4 million volumes and 12 million manuscript sheets; and a new collection storage modules at Fort Meade, the first opening in 2002, to preserve and make accessible more than 4 million items from the Library's analog collections. Billington established the Library Collections Security Oversight Committee in 1992 to improve protection of collections, and also the Library of Congress Congressional Caucus in 2008 to draw attention to the Library's curators and collections. He created the Library's first Young Readers Center in the Jefferson Building in 2009, and the first large-scale summer intern (Junior Fellows) program for university students in 1991. Under Billington, the Library also sponsored the Gateway to Knowledge in 2010–2011, a mobile exhibition to 90 sites covering all states east of the Mississippi in a specially designed 18-wheel truck, increasing public access to library collections off-site, particularly for rural populations.
During his tenure at the Library of Congress, Billington championed no-fee electronic services, beginning with: American Memory in 1990, which became The National Digital Library in 1994, providing free access online to digitized American history and culture resources with curatorial explanations for K-12 education; thomas.gov website in 1994 to provide free public access to U.S. federal legislative information with ongoing updates; and congress.gov website to provide a state-of-the-art framework for both Congress and the public in 2012; Educational portal for K-12 teachers and students in 1996, and subsequently new prizes and programs for advancing literacy in 2013; Online social media presence for the Library beginning in 2007, which expanded to include blogs, Flickr, establishment of Flickr Commons, Facebook, iTunesU, Pinterest, RSS, Twitter, YouTube and other new media channels. Twitter donated its digital archive to the Library of Congress in 2010; its vice president of engineering, Greg Pass noted, "I am very grateful that Dr. Billington and the Library recognize the value of this information." "eCo" online copyright registration, status-checking, processing, and electronic file upload systems in 2008; The World Digital Library in 2009, in association with UNESCO and 181 partners in 81 countries, to make online copies of professionally curated primary materials of the world's varied cultures free available in multiple languages. Resource Description and Access (RDA) in 2010, a new cataloguing standard for the digital age implemented in 2013; BIBFRAME in 2011, a data model for bibliographic description to provide a foundation for those depending on bibliographic data shared by the Library with partners on the web and in the broader networked world; National Jukebox in 2011 to provide streaming free online access to more than 10,000 out-of-print music and spoken word recordings. BARD in 2013, digital talking books mobile app for Braille and Audio Reading Downloads in partnership with the Library's National Library Service for the blind and physically handicapped, that enables free downloads of audio and Braille books to mobile devices via the Apple App Store. Billington directed the growth of the Library of Congress' digital outreach and analog collections during the period 1992 through 2014 when the Library also experienced a 30 percent decrease in its staff largely due to legislative appropriations cutbacks. Every three years, the Librarian reviews the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In 2010, Billington's decision to open new DMCA loopholes resulted in his being described as "the most important person you never heard of, having headed the library since well before the Web was spun or the DMCA was even a glint in the Recording Industry Association of America's eye ... It was probably Billington's unassailable reputation for integrity and probity that won the LOC this power under the DMCA."
Billington championed the Library's American Memory National Digital Library (NDL) Program, which makes freely available on-line over 24 million American historical items from the collections of the Library and other research institutions. Besides these unique American Memory materials, the Library Internet services include the congressional database, THOMAS; the on-line card catalog; exhibitions; information from the U.S. Copyright Office; and a web site for children and families called America's Library. In fiscal year 2013 the Library's website recorded 84 million visits and 519 million page views.
Billington also established the following new programs at the Library of Congress: The National Book Festival, founded in 2001 with Laura Bush, which has brought more than 10000 authors and more than a million guests to the National Mall and the Washington Convention Center. Thanks to a major gift from David Rubenstein in 2013, Billington also promoted the establishment of Library of Congress Literacy Awards to recognize and support achievements in improving literacy in the United States and abroad; The Kluge Center, started in 2000 with a grant of $60 million John W. Kluge, the Kluge Center increases engagement of scholars with the U.S. Congress and other public leaders brought to the Library through endowed Kluge fellowships; The Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity (now worth $1.5 million), the first Nobel-level international prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences (subjects not included in the Nobel awards); The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, which opened in 2007 at a 45-acre site in Culpeper, Virginia, thanks to the largest private gift ever made to the Library (more than $150 million by the Packard Humanities Institute) and $82.1 million additional support from Congress. In 1988, Billington also established the National Film Preservation Board, a congressionally mandated National Film Preservation Board to select American films annually for preservation and inclusion in the new National Registry. The Librarian named 650 films to the Registry by 2015; The Veterans History Project, congressionally mandated in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans from World War I to the present day; The National Registry of Recorded Sound, congressionally mandated in 2000, to which Billington has selected 425 recordings to date; The Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, started in 2007 to honor the work of an artist whose career reflects lifetime achievement in song composition. Winners have included Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Carole King, Billy Joel, and Willie Nelson. Billington also launched the Living Legend Awards in 2000 to honor artists, activists, filmmakers, and others who have contributed to America's diverse cultural, scientific, and social heritage, (he was himself declared a Library of Congress Living Legend after his tenure); Open World Leadership Center started in 2000, which has administered 23,000 professional exchanges for emerging post-Soviet leaders in Russia, Ukraine, and the other successor states of the former USSR to visit counterparts in the United States. Open World began as a Library of Congress project, and later became an independent agency in the legislative branch. Billington is founder and was chairman of the board of trustees. The Fiction Prize (now the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction) created in 2008 to recognize distinguished lifetime achievement in the writing of fiction.