which are not lost but only misplaced on the shelves; going to arrearages of binding or cataloging for other books which should be on the shelves.

Despite these deficiencies I am asking for only a small increase this year, amounting to 6.7 percent of our base for 1953. Even of this amount, 16 percent is to meet statutory increases, 6 percent is for operations which will reimburse their cost and even return a profit to the Treasury; 22 percent is for improved service of books for the blind, and 11 percent is for the Legislative Reference Service. This leaves only 45 percent or $284,273 for what I have been calling the central operations. Of this amount $77,000 or 12 percent is for nonpersonnel items to offset increased costs and to restore our appropriations for the "Increase of the collections" to their former level.

This is much less than these central operations require, and I have requested more for them in previous years. I have reduced the request this year to a minimum. This year we have presented our estimates under new headings, worked out at the suggestion of the committee last year, with the assistance of the committee staff and the Comptroller General. This arrangement reduces the budget headings from 16 to 8 and at the same time consolidates the appropriations for related activities.

We have a very devoted staff at the Library. Morale is high, and we believe in our work. Many of our employees voluntarily work many hours beyond the prescribed schedules. But voluntary, unremunerated overtime cannot solve our problem. The request I am making for Library proper is only a fraction of our total need, but will help to remedy some of the most glaring deficiencies.

Dr. EVANS. Gentlemen, the first thing that any Librarian of Congress always wants to say to this committee is that we believe the support that the Congress has given to the Library of Congress in the past 150 or more years has made it one of the greatest cultural institutions of this country and certainly the greatest library that mankind has ever had.

This Library is under the Congress of the United States. It is not under the Executive and the service of Congress has been our controlling principle throughout our history. This has led to the growth of these collections and in recent years, that growth has been going very fast because of the natural increases in the amount of printed matter caused by the natural growth of the publishing of books, the increase of the issuance of Government documents, but also, gentlemen, because of the increased responsibilities of this Government in the world and the increased necessity of our having the printed material from out-of-the-way places of the world, some of which we have mentioned here, so that our Government research workers who plan the research and do the research upon which policies are decided both in the executive and legislative branches, may do their work as intelligently as possible.

In the past 10 years, the Library has grown 82 percent in its collections measured in terms of physical units. In that time, the Legislative Reference Service has increased 180 percent. The Card Division which is self-supporting for the most part, has increased 56 percent. The Copyright Office which also more than reimburses for what we spend, in terms of fees plus the material deposited, has increased 74 percent and the appropriation "Books for the blind" is almost 3 times as large as it was 10 years ago.

These are all justified, gentlemen, and I am proud of the fact that you have shown your support of these activities in this way, but for the basic operations of the Library, for the acquiring of books, for the cataloging of books, for their binding, for getting them to the readers, for answering reference questions, for operating the Law Library, for cleaning and guarding the building, for all of this, sir, we have increased from only 920 positions (which I think ought to be the measure of our

ability to do the work) in 1943 to 1,032 today, or only about 12 percent. I am trying to put this basic problem in its setting with the others.

Now, in using this additional 12 percent of staff, we have been under the necessity of absorbing and servicing acquisitions totalling more than 11 million pieces in the last 8 years alone. This business of pieces needs a little explanation. It does not mean that many separate books but it includes issues of newspapers, it includes issues of periodicals, it includes a lot of other things that do not add up to bound volumes but nevertheless which have to be handled. have to pick them up and lay them down. We have to do something with them.

We

Now, gentlemen, we think that a 12-percent increase to handle that enormous increase in collections and to handle a great increase in demands of service, has pushed us to the point where we have begun to weaken our services. We have begun to go downhill.

We have made many adjustments of one kind or another to try to take care of the new areas from which and concerning which we need to buy books; to shift our cataloging staff so that they can catalog the books in the different languages which are flooding in upon us. But these adjustments are not sufficient and the situation is beginning in some respects to break down. We have tried our best to economize. We are putting more and more of our books in this kind of a binding which we call quarter binding, fairly substantial, fairly good for small books that are not used very much and fewer and fewer of our books in this kind of binding which is more of a standard library binding. Even this is a modified type from the standard that the Government Printing Office was supplying us before we helped make a new design in order to get the cost down. This is cheaper than many of the bindings used on library books.

We have been trying to keep our administrative salaries, our staffing standards well below the Government level. We have 1 employee for 7,300 vouchers audited whereas the Government standard is one for 3,500. That means that we ought to have 2 employees where we have 1 according to the Government standard. But we have introduced labor saving equipment, and that has been a lot of help to us in making economies. Our average salary, we believe, is lower than that of similar agencies. We have tried not to inflate our wages beyond the merits of the case. And we are still looking for ways of making economies. I think some of our people have done really noble things in trying to cut corners, trying to simplify procedures, trying to get rid of outmoded methods.

We have also reduced our services to some extent. We have less of a full-time service in some of our book stacks, but we do have the building open long hours and people can get the books before 5:30, let us say, and read them until 10 o'clock at night if they like and they can also use the reference collections. So we do not believe we have done great injury to the public, but we did actually do some injury by making it less easy for people doing private research, some people in the Government, to do work in the evening that they otherwise would have done.

We have also deferred a lot of work. We have set up a priority 4 in cataloging which allows us to find things by rough subject classifica

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tion and by author without full cataloging. We have a lot of material that needs binding.

About this priority 4, we are putting off the date when we have to catalog the material. Some of it we have to get out and catalog before the first year is over because there is a demand for it. But we do save a good deal of work by putting things in this suspended condition.

We have many volumes which need binding. Many of our volumes have had to be withdrawn from service because we could not bind them. We are letting our stacks get into a shocking condition in many respects because we do not have enough shelving. We are putting in wooden shelves in some places and in many places we are making double rows of books, one row behind the other on the shelf. We have, by gifts and transfers of funds, done a lot to take care of a situation which would have been critical much earlier. I think I ought to explain to the members of the committee, Mr. Chairman, that we have been the recipient of a couple million dollars a year of transferred funds from other agencies for special projects, some of them in the immediate area of operations of the Library, some of them in a peripheral area but nevertheless closely related to our operations. These other agencies give us a 10 percent allowance for administrative costs and the funds that have thus been available have permitted us to cover some of these basic operations and keep the sitaution from getting worse than it actually has become.

PERSONNEL PAID FROM TRANSFERRED FUNDS

Mr. HORAN. How much of your staff is supported by transferred funds?

Dr. EVANS. It is approximately 537 out of a total of 2,300 people. Mr. HORAN. Do you consider that good?

Dr. EVANS. We consider, sir, that those projects are in most cases, so related to our collections and the increase in total efficiency is so great, that it is within the total economy of the Government an economic way to operate.

Mr. HORAN. That is not what I asked you. I do not question that. Dr. EVANS. I think it is good, sir, but I think we are just about as far as we can go because there is a space problem and we have told some of these agencies that if they expand their operations in the Library, they will have to provide for separate space for some of these operations.

Mr. HORAN. You missed the point of my question entirely.

A large percentage of the Bureau of Standards staff are not supported by direct appropriation; for better than 20 years some of our most useful members of the staff down at the Bureau of Standards have existed on transferred funds. They depend for their security on annual transfers.

How you can expect to maintain essential and permanent morale in these divisions, and accept the principle of the annual transfer of funds, escapes me. I have complained about it as a Member of Congress knowing some of these individuals and knowing some of the great work they have done down at the Bureau of Standards. I protest the acceptance on the part of administrative heads of having their departments, their divisions, their institutions, sup

ported on the basis of transferred funds from other agencies. It is not honest. If we accept the decades of transfers of funds, why not give the recipients of salaries from those transferred funds the security that should exist in a direct appropriation?

Now, this was first advanced to me by someone I know very well and he has been paid out of transferred funds, I believe, for nearly 20 years.

Dr. EVANS. Mr. Chairman

Mr. HORAN. I might add before you interrupt, that I took it up with the Civil Service Commission, I believe, and I took it up with the Bureau of the Budget and they turned me down on any consideration of the eradication of the transfer of funds principle, yet it is wrong. If you have people in the Library of Congress, Dr. Evans, who have existed for any length of time on the principle of transfer of funds, I wish you would give it some thought and see if we cannot appropriate directly.

Dr. EVANS. Mr. Chairman, there are some things that we are doing with these transferred funds that it would be appropriate to have the Library do on a more or less permanent basis. Some of the things, however, are really special projects and we would not welcome them on a permanent basis.

Mr. HORAN. Do the people who are doing this work know this? Dr. EVANS. I think they know that some of the things are of a project character.

Mr. HORAN. Is it down in writing?

Dr. EVANS. We have told them that we cannot anticipate the projects continuing indefinitely.

Mr. HORAN. Have you put it down in writing?

Dr. EVANS. We have put this in writing, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HORAN. To the individual concerned?

Dr. EVANS. Yes, sir; that we will give them permanent tenure in the Library of Congress if they fulfill

Mr. HORAN. How long can you do that? You are assuming that this subcommittee at some future date will accept your proposal.

Dr. EVANS. The general problem, Mr. Chairman, is this: We treat these people as having the same rights as our people on appropriated funds and as being in competition with them for continued employ

ment.

Mr. HORAN. How long can you do that? This is something that has bothered me, Dr. Evans, for years, and I cannot apologize for it. I do not think that on the transfer of funds we can maintain a permanent institution. So I wish you would talk to that point. How can you do it?

Dr. EVANS. Let me talk on the general

Mr. HORAN. We cannot commit the next Congress. As chairman of the subcommittee, I cannot commit the next subcommittee.

Mr. GARY. Neither can you commit them so far as employees on direct appropriations are concerned.

Dr. EVANS. We give them the same tenure as other employees and let them compete with one another in any reduction-in-force program for whatever jobs are left. We would try to keep the best from both groups. It gives a certain sense of insecurity to everyone, no doubt.

Mr. HORAN. I am probably wrong, just put it down in the record that I am against the transfer of funds and building a permanent

workable institution on that principle. I am against it. This is the way I feel. You do not have to follow my advice. I wish that you would exert your influence to have these things which have been, over a period of years, based on a transfer of funds made a permanent part of your budget estimate. I am serious about this because the morale of good men in Government is involved and I mean it.

Dr. EVANS. Mr. Chairman, I do not want anything I said to be construed as disagreeing with you. I would place the transferred funds projects, however, in two groups. Some of them I think are rather special and probably temporary but to the continuing ones I agree with you. I agree with you and

Mr. HORAN. I want the folks that work in those temporary projects to know that they are temporary.

Dr. EVANS. We tell them, sir, if they really are temporary. We give everyone of our employees a written statement of exactly what his tenure terms are at every stage.

Mr. CLAPP. Mr. Chairman, may I add one word?

Mr. HORAN. Yes; I might have a letter from somebody tomorrow saying, "I have been separated from my job and what can we do about it?"

Mr. CLAPP. We have been worried about this the same way you are. We used to have a class of employees in the Library called indefinite and we told this guy who got an indefinite appointment that he was here today but that we would not tell him when he would be gone, maybe a year from now, maybe 5 years from now, maybe 10 years from now. We have abolished the indefinite appointment. All appointments now are either temporary, as say for 6 months and you go out at 6 months; or they are permanent (if you have a probational appointment, it turns usually into permanent). And the guy on the permanent footing is part of the Library staff, whether he is paid from transferred funds or not. This means that if a project should run on for 3 years and then all of a sudden one of the transferring agencies decides to cut it out, that the job is at an end. Well, we cannot stop this. It is out of our hands. In many cases we would not want to stop it. We would have to admit that the job is done but in those cases those fellows are on the same footing with everybody else in the Library, and we all take it-the people who sit here along with the greenest typist who may have been appointed on one of these projects, maybe the year before. We have worried about this problem and this is the way we have solved it. It isn't a perfect solution, but it is a fair and decent one. These people know that we are all subject to an appropriation, that none of us, that neither the chairman of a committee nor the Speaker of the House

Mr. HORAN. Off the record.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. GARY. Doctor, are these employees paid from transferred funds, regular employees of the Library?

Dr. EVANS. Yes, sir. We give them that status.

Mr. GARY. Do they occupy exactly the same status as the other employees?

Dr. EVANS. Yes, sir, and compete with them in case of a reduction in force for any reason including reduction of transferred funds. We do that also, gentlemen, on our revolving funds. You may be right, but I hope we hold the scales fairly as between the two groups. (Discussion off the record.)