Beneath the Vaulted Silence: How the Library of Congress is losing the past it was built to protect

Alexander Fernandez

A legacy neglected

The Library of Congress (Library) in Washington, D.C., was established by an act of Congress in 1800 during John Adams’ presidency. It is the largest library in the world by cataloged holdings, with more than 178 million items in its collections as of 2025 and about 12,000 new items added each day, according to the Library’s About page. Its archives span books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, films, recordings and assorted curiosities such as a lock of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven, the first printed map naming “America,” Babylonian cuneiform tablets, and Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten Gettysburg Address. Among its greatest book curations is the Gutenberg Bible, purchased in 1930, one of only three perfect copies on vellum known to exist worldwide, Thomas Jefferson’s entire personal library and his annotated Bible, along with a medieval copy of Euclid’s Elements.

For over two centuries, the Library has stood as the nation’s intellectual and cultural heart, stretching across continents and generations. Beyond serving as a public destination, the Library functions as the research arm of Congress and houses the U.S. Copyright Office, which administers federal copyright law. Yet behind its marble floors and celebrated reading rooms lies a more troubling reality. The very collections the Library was created to safeguard face mounting risks from deferred maintenance, oversight lapses, and fragmented governance.

The Library was never intended to be a museum of what once mattered. According to its Fiscal Year 2024 Agency Financial Report (p.7), its mission is “to engage, inspire, and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity.” It serves as a living archive: preserving, organizing, and opening the cumulative achievements of human civilization to the public; designed not only as a keeper of knowledge but as an active steward of memory, curated, contextualized, and sustained for generations to come.

Reviews of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) audits, Office of the Inspector General (OIG) semiannual reports, and testimony from former curators and preservation specialists point not to a single failure but to a pattern of persistent weaknesses. A months-long investigation, drawing on decades of audit findings and testimony from manuscript scholars, reveals systemic weaknesses that OIG and GAO reports say have left key preservation risks unaddressed. According to these findings, gaps in cataloging, preservation inspections, and authority over conservation leave parts of the nation’s cultural record vulnerable. The threat is not deliberate action but delay and inaction. Those problems remain unresolved.

OIG and GAO reports reviewed by Life News Today indicate that the Library’s preservation and cataloging responsibilities are divided across multiple service units without a single office accountable for long-term conservation outcomes. This fragmentation has left critical decisions about care and oversight vulnerable to delay.

Lost and Unavailable Materials

A Jan.11 “Not-on-Shelf” (NOS) evaluation (p. 5) and OIG plans from FY 2023-2025 found that 4 percent of requested physical items were missing from the general collection, with no reconciliation process in place. The Library’s 2023 NOS SP-101 evaluation (pp. 4-7) noted that when the current inventory management system was implemented in 2000, additional data was needed for items already in the Library’s possession to make their online records complete. As a result, legacy items still require ongoing review.

While OIG’s plan flagged this as a risk area, no published audit has determined whether the missing items were misfiled, lacked documentation, or were permanently untraceable. As of May 2025, the most recent OIG reports available, including the Surplus Books Program Evaluation (Report No. 2024-SP-104, May 7, 2025) and the Audit of the Library’s Implementation of Contracting Officer’s Representative Best Practices (Report No. 2024-PA-102, May 20, 2025), had not resolved or closed this issue.

A parallel concern exists with many books and documents being kept in stacks on the floor. The Library cannot systematically reduce the unorganized influx of manuscripts and books without proper facilities; many of those volumes remain in “overcrowded stacks in the Jefferson and Adams Buildings,” as noted in the January 2024 NOS Evaluation (pp. 5–8). The January 2024 OIG evaluation further observed, “items double shelved, stacked along the floor, and shelved on book carts at the end of the shelves, which could make collection items more difficult for staff to locate” (2023-SP-101, p. 6). Although the OIG’s FY 2023–2025 Work Plan scheduled a NOS evaluation, detailed findings have not been published. Without those results, it remains unclear how overcrowding and incomplete inventory records in the Jefferson and Adams Buildings contribute to the NOS rate (OIG Work Plan, FY 2023–2025).

The Library’s FY 2023 (p. 84) Annual Report acknowledged that “while the Library has made progress in developing appropriate preservation storage of collection items at its off-site facilities, the Library has inadequate space in many storage areas and insufficient resources to support all treatment, reformatting, and cataloging needs.” It noted that expansion at Fort Meade and the Packard Campus had only partially addressed these problems.

OIG semiannual reports since 2016 have documented persistent infrastructure and storage concerns, including “[potentially moving additional] permanent collections [to] Fort Meade” and ending a reliance on temporary leased facilities.

The September 2016 OIG Semiannual Report to Congress (p. 11) found that the Prints and Photographs Division’s backlog of unprocessed materials had grown by more than one million items since 2005. At current staffing and processing rates, it is estimated the division would need “approximately 40 to 60 years to eliminate the backlog of materials that are not fully processed.”

What is at stake is not just ink on vellum or script on parchment. It is the quiet complexity of handwritten annotations, the patina of centuries on a cracked spine, the palimpsest that holds both a forgotten past and a rediscovered truth. These are not relics; they are revelations waiting to be protected.

The persistence of these challenges was evident in the Prints and Photographs Division. By 2023, the backlog had not materially improved, and the March 2023 Semiannual Report again cited collections management as an unresolved challenge. The Jan. 11, 2024, OIG evaluation found that unprocessed materials remained largely unchanged since 2011, while recent initiatives emphasized customer service improvements rather than reducing the NOS rate.

The persistence of missing or untraceable items, according to Inspector General evaluations, stems from outdated inventory systems and the absence of a centralized authority responsible for reconciling physical holdings with digital records. Without that accountability, backlogs remain cyclical rather than corrective.

Miscatalogued and Undescribed Works

Interviews and audits reviewed by Life News Today show that insufficient codicological expertise and limited cataloging staff have allowed under described manuscripts to remain effectively invisible within the collection. The lack of a structured cataloging and review framework perpetuates the invisibility experts warn against. During a 2023 vault inspection, Dr. Ilya Dines, former Library rare books curator in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, observed rare manuscripts shelved without casings, catalog entries, or environmental monitoring, and stated some works were entirely undocumented.

In a Jan. 5, 2025, interview, Dines, who served as a rare book curator until his dismissal in 2023, said the problem extended to preservation and basic cataloging. “Part of [the] manuscript collection doesn’t have shelf marks. I often would create the shelf marks myself when I would find a manuscript without one,” he explained, referring to the identifier used to catalog and locate individual volumes (Interview, Jan. 5, 2025, ~2:30).

He also explained how thin or inaccurate records render holdings unusable. “If manuscripts are not properly described, they become invisible because they go onto a shelf, but no one knows what’s in them. A manuscript is not like a book. It often contains a variety of different texts. Think of it as an entire miniature library” (Interview, Jan. 13, 2025, ~01:13–03:00).

Professor Gregory Heyworth, a codicologist and director of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, internationally recognized for his work in multispectral imaging and manuscript preservation, said that two- or three-sentence entries “do not even actually come to the level of description.” Without robust cataloging, he added, “manuscripts are simply invisible.”

Inflated or Poorly Controlled Purchases

Between 2010 and 2023, the Library authorized millions of dollars in rare acquisitions, often without formal appraisals, external evaluations, or codicological review. In a Jan. 11, 2025 email, Dines, wrote that “the Library purchased a manuscript for $250,000, which turned out to be a work of Thomas Aquinas. They paid $250,000 for it, even though it isn’t worth half that amount.” In the same correspondence and in interviews, Dines criticized the absence of “formal appraisal, external evaluation, and scholarly review committee” oversight.

Dines stressed that inflated payments were not confined to a single manuscript. He alleged a recurring pattern in which vendors set prices well above market value and the Library accepted them without negotiation. “[The] Library of Congress actually buys things without thinking,” he said (Interview, Jan. 5, 2025, ~21:23). Dines maintained that manuscripts routinely sold for two to three times their auction or private-sale equivalents, a practice he argued distorted the value of the collection while draining limited acquisition funds.

In a Jan. 10, 2025, interview, Dines claimed the Library never verifies vendor assertions. “So theoretically it must be like that. You have three hundred thousand dollars; you are the vendor. First you have to have your database where to buy. There are hundreds of shops in the world where you can buy. But the Library does not check. They just buy it. They accept what they are told,” he said (~30:56 Jan. 10, 2025).

According to Heyworth, buying manuscripts is like “buying diamonds … most are going to cost you 150% more than what they’re worth,” adding that “98% of the time it’s not” priced correctly (Jan. 13, 2025, interview (~19:46).

In mid-August 2023, Dines filed a hotline complaint with the OIG, alleging waste and inflated pricing in rare manuscript acquisitions. In his memo Principles of Manuscripts Acquisition, he argued that proper purchases required “a fair evaluation of the item; … codicological analysis; [and] a list of the literature (scholarly) where the item is mentioned,” and wrote that the “current acquisition method driven by vendors does not meet these standards.” He specifically cited “the manuscript of St. Thomas Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles, sold to the Library for $225,000,” adding that “a similar manuscript is worth around 30,000–60,000 (auction) and $100,000–120,000 private sale,” and that “no image of the manuscript was required, and no consultation was performed” (Principles of Manuscripts Acquisition; ROI 24-0001-I, Exhibit #5).

Dines’ expertise was acknowledged by his colleagues and superiors, unfortunately, his recommendations were never followed. According to a Petition for Review (p. 2, 3, 4) filed by Dines Aug. 7, 2024, with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (OCWR) (Case 23-LC-44), on June 12, 2023, Dines met with Acting Assistant Chief Michael North to discuss what he described as “the possibility of a consistent pattern of overpayment for manuscripts.” Additionally, North stated, “Claimant, as a recognized scholar in his field, brought with him a wealth of expertise. This expertise did not stem from only an immediate analysis of medieval manuscripts but also more nuanced concerns in the field, such as how to preserve manuscripts or how much a manuscript should be valued.”

The same appeal includes a July 17, 2023, email from Kurt Carroll, then-Chief of the Collection Services Division, cautioning: “[Library staff] do not generally place values on collection items. It is possible the Library has paid high prices for acquired items, absolutely. I was told there was no room for negotiation, that the list price was the price. When I became chief, we did actively pursue discounts and price reductions to much success.”

No public Library record exists of an independent committee review or codicological reassessment of the manuscripts Dines flagged, including those acquired with only abbreviated vendor descriptions. Nor has the Library issued a formal announcement of corrective action, an internal memo of acknowledgment, or a public response addressing the substance of his concerns. The silence underscores a broader pattern: questions raised inside and outside the institution about acquisitions have lingered without public resolution. The pattern reflects deeper organizational and governance failures.

Book and Artifact Damage

Beyond flawed acquisitions, deeper failures lie in what happens after the books arrive, how they are stored, documented, and preserved. Many manuscripts, including items dating to the 13th century, were housed in what Dines described as substandard conditions. He recalled opening storage drawers filled with unprotected parchment and leather-bound volumes, some showing early signs of mold. Although he made requests for environmental monitoring and preservation review, the requests often went unanswered. In notes submitted to the Library on April 20, 2023, he emphasized that the mold issue he had identified was likely not an isolated case. He reiterated his call for action later that spring, stressing the need for regular inspections to address the potential scope of mold contamination across the vaults. In Dines’ March 29, 2023, notes, he wrote: “Today I showed Jennifer Davis [collection specialist in the Law Library’s Collection Services Division] a picture of a manuscript with mold. I told her that if this is a real mold, then an inspection of the whole vault has to be done.” Weeks later, he recorded that a colleague, Nathan Dorn, curator of the Rare Books Collection in the Law Library, dismissed the concern: “He believes that the mold I told him about is dry and therefore not dangerous. I tried to explain to him that it is not true, but I was unsuccessful” (Dr. Dines Notes, Apr. 18–19, 2023).

Jennifer Meehan, then-director of the Special Collections Directorate, acknowledged Dines’ approach in a June 8, 2023 internal email to Davis and Dorn: “I got a surprise visit from Ilya Dines just now wanting to meet with me about this. I deflected and asked that he contact me via email with additional details for consideration … Either way, I suspect this is something to defer for the new chief” (Email from Jennifer Meehan, June 8, 2023). Taken together, the dismissals and deferrals left Dines’ concerns unaddressed.

He is not the only expert noticing the lack of maintenance and mold controls within the Library. “A head conservator is the person who checks [for damage and maintenance] every few years [and] does an inventory of the manuscripts and looks very, very carefully for types of damage. This is not happening in the Library of Congress,” Heyworth said (Jan. 13 2025, ~14:57–15:02). 

Life News Today reached out during August and September to Jennifer Davis, collection specialist in the Law Library’s Collection Services Division; Nathan Dorn, curator of rare books in the Law Library of Congress, Jennifer Meehan, director of the Special Collections Directorate, and Robert R. Newlen, Acting Librarian of Congress regarding Dr. Dines’s 2023 mold-related concerns. None responded by the publication date.

In an Aug. 29, 2025, written response to Life News Today, Debbie Lehrich, counsel to the Inspector General, confirmed the continuity of these issues. “Over the years, we have identified various collections-related issues as a long-standing management challenge for the Library. We discuss management challenges within each of our Semiannual Reports to Congress,” she wrote. Lehrich also noted that “the Office’s audits, which are publicly available, have not found any confirmed cases of irreversible collection loss or outsized harm to specific holdings.”

In an Oct. 1, 2025, response conveyed through Lehrich, Inspector General Kimberly Figel Benoit clarified that “the Library does not have any unimplemented recommendations in these categories [physical collections and long-term conservation oversight].” Lehrich further wrote that the OIG has “no recent or planned work” on centralized preservation authority or inspection protocols, and added, “At this time, we are not aware of any environmental monitoring issues.”

Preservation failures documented in interviews and internal correspondence trace to inadequate environmental monitoring, incomplete inspection schedules, and deferred maintenance flagged in successive OIG reports. Auditors and former staff attribute these lapses to chronic underfunding of conservation relative to new acquisitions.

IT and Governance Failures

The Library of Congress has consistently raised concerns about its lack of funding for crucial preservation and modernization efforts. While these financial constraints are real, the Library’s own internal audits reveal a longstanding, organizational issue: a failure to efficiently manage and utilize the resources it already has.

The OIG audit uncovered critical deficiencies in the Library’s asset management system, specifically regarding end-user devices like computers and scanners. Devices were found to be mismanaged, with inventory discrepancies, retirement dates missing, and assets marked as retired but still in use, according to the July 2024 IT Inventory Controls for End User Devices Audit. These issues raise a pressing question: if the Library cannot effectively manage its own inventory systems for technology, how can it be trusted to protect and preserve the physical books and manuscripts that it claims to prioritize?

Auditors noted gaps between the information entered by Information Systems Services (ISS) logistics personnel into the Asset Management Tracking System (AMTS) and the data gathered by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) during annual physical inventories. This lack of accurate inventory tracking not only complicates the Library's ability to manage resources effectively but also raises concerns about potential misuse or loss of assets.

A July 15, 2024, performance audit (p. 2) concluded that the Library had not conducted annual physical inventories of their devices since 2019. Auditors reported “discrepancies between information that ISS logistics personnel input into AMTS and information that OCIO obtained via annual physical inventories, including devices that were still connected to the network but not listed in AMTS, devices marked retired but missing retirement dates, and devices physically present but missing from AMTS entirely.”

Four days later, a separate OIG audit (Report No. 2023-IT-101, p. 8) reinforced those findings, warning that incomplete IT asset records increased “the likelihood of theft, misuse, or misappropriation of the devices” and could lead to “wasteful purchases of such equipment” (July 19, 2024). Auditors also noted that 225 of 400 desktops on a recent purchase order had been entered incorrectly into AMTS.

Prioritizing Modernization Over Preservation

While preservation and inventory remain unresolved, modernization efforts are heavily funded. According to the Library of Congress Fiscal Year 2020 Agency Financial Report, “Congress appropriated $40 million in federal funds to the Library for the Visitor Experience Master Plan (VEMP)” (p. 22). To slow and minimize rising costs, the Library and the Architect of the Capitol (AOC), the federal agency responsible for maintaining and constructing buildings for the legislative branch, including the Library of Congress, agreed on Feb. 10, 2024, to extend the Orientation Gallery schedule to March 2027.

According to the Feb. 8, 2025, Follow-Up Evaluation, this measure was intended to limit further increases after the project’s cost had already further risen from $60 million to $95.6 million between 2019 and 2024 (p. 26). The Inspector General stated: “By not ensuring that they jointly maintain control of cost estimates, the VEMP project’s cost estimates have constantly changed and will continue to change.”

Public-facing initiatives now emphasize online exhibitions, virtual programming, and projects like Of the People and Chronicling America, which expand availability of rare materials. Shortly after being sworn in, now-former Head Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden said, “The biggest opportunity for the Library is to make its wonderful treasures available to people … make people aware that it is part of their national heritage and that everyone can find something in the Library that relates to them, their classroom curriculum, or where they want to go in life,” according to the Library of Congress FY2019–2023 Strategic Plan, Access Goal Statement, p. 7 of 9.

While the Library’s efforts to digitize its collections and make them accessible to a broader public are a necessary advancement, this initiative comes with significant costs, not only financial, but also in maintaining historical authenticity.

In discussing the limitations of digitization, Heyworth emphasized the importance of using the highest technological standards, such as multi-spectral imaging, to preserve the rich details of historical manuscripts. “When you say digitization, what you're really talking about is photography and color photography,” (Interview, Jan. 13, 2025, ~08:17–09:50) Heyworth explained. “What you need to know is there are many ways to photograph. I specialize in multi-spectral imaging. Multi-spectral imaging enables a person to read things that are otherwise incredibly difficult to see or invisible on the page.” He highlighted the limitations of regular RGB photography, which often fails to capture accurate colors and subtle details critical for art historians studying pigments, manuscript alterations, and other fine features.

Strategic plans and annual financial statements from FY 2021 through FY 2024 consistently emphasized digital enablement, citing major allocations for web platforms, OCR processing, and metadata systems. By contrast, reported investments in conservation enclosures, climate monitoring, and rare-item stabilization either remained flat or were omitted from year-over-year benchmarks (FY 2021 MD&A, pp. 7–8; FY 2022 p. 7; FY 2023 pp. 7–8; FY 2024 pp. 7–9).

Budget records and annual reports confirm that digital modernization has outpaced investment in physical preservation, leaving environmental controls and conservation capacity lagging behind. Experts warn that without balancing access with stewardship, digitization may widen rather than close the preservation gap.

Expert warnings ignored / A Path Forward

The threat facing the Library is not dramatic. It will not come as fire or flood. It is quiet and cumulative. A misplaced item here. A mold bloom there. A missed inspection. A discarded report. The slow kind of loss, insidious and while not irreversible, is difficult to recover from. It emerges not from sabotage but, as OIG audits and evaluations have repeatedly shown, from prolonged delay and inaction (March 2023 Semiannual Report, p. 23; January 2024 NOS Evaluation, pp. 5–8; February 2025 VEMP Follow-Up, pp. 5–6).

According to a Jan. 13, 2025, interview, Heyworth underscored the need for in-house expertise: “a codicologist has the same role in a manuscript library as a doctor to a practice. They’re the ones who need to take care of the patient, who describe what the problem is, diagnose problems and ability. They’re the ones who keep the collections in good health” (~35:03–36:00) [sic]. On comparative standards, he was blunt: “the Library of Congress, from what I have seen, is far below the standards of our other major nations, just far below it” (~08:17–09:10). Building on what Inspector General Counsel Lehrich described as a “long-standing management challenge” in the Library’s semiannual reports, scholars and auditors have emphasized that the path to recovery is not only possible but actionable.

One proposal raised by Heyworth calls for creating an external acquisitions and preservation board made up of manuscript scholars, codicologists, and conservation scientists. In a Jan. 13, 2025, interview with Life News Today, Heyworth said, “the Library of Congress needs to do a thorough, thorough revamp of its entire culture, and that cannot be led from within. Someone has to look from without” (~1:02:24).

Dines, who was terminated shortly after raising internal concerns, echoed the call for reform saying the Library still can correct course. “If the Library wants to, it can fix this,” he said. “But it needs the will, and it needs to listen” (Interview, July 14, 2023, ~02:45–03:12).

Still, this is not a closed case. The Library has the institutional knowledge, the public trust, and a history of remarkable resilience. What it requires now is structural resolve—the will to act deliberately, transparently, and with scholarly integrity. Beneath those vaulted ceilings, what endures will depend not on sentiment but on execution. Until recommendations are implemented and there is measurable accountability, the same vulnerabilities will continue to reappear and eventually our history will vanish.