Dr. Deanna Bowling Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services, Library of Congress, was invited to the National Diet Library (NDL) and gave a lecture titled "The Roles of National Libraries in the Changing Electronic Environment" for the NDL staff members. The Library of Congress has been playing a leading role in developing a digital library and has successfully developed many projects in the digital arena, from digitization projects such as the world-famous American Memory to web archiving and long-term digital preservation including the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).

Dr. Marcum spoke to the NDL staff very warmly as she addressed them as fellow librarians working in the counterpart of the library she serves in the U.S. This implies not only that the NDL was modeled after the Library of Congress when founded but also that both libraries are facing the same kind of opportunities and challenges in this rapidly changing electronic environment. She explained about the strategic plan under which the Library of Congress is currently operated. The plan has the following four goals: 1) to build and preserve a comprehensive collection of knowledge and creativity in all formats and languages for use by the Congress and other customers; 2) to provide maximum access and facilitate effective use of the collections by the Congress and other customers; 3) to lead, promote, and support the growth and influence of the national and international library and information communities; and 4) to expand, manage, and communicate Library of Congress digital strategies and roles.

The plan has already been forced to be adjusted in order to adapt to the recent technological developments. The Library of Congress has begun to work on a new plan to guide the library in the five-year period, 2008-2013. She gave the audience a brief overview of this new plan as it is still in a draft state. 

Next she explored the four major areas in which she believes national libraries should play a leading role in the immediate future. The first three responsibilities are already familiar to librarians, namely, standards development, bibliographic control, and preservation. There also is potentially a fourth, however, that national libraries should take up as a new major role: to create digital libraries larger than their own, that is, to become libraries for the world, not only by putting their collections online, but also by integrating their individual digital collections into aggregations that people can access through a single portal. This kind of attempt has already been started by private companies such as Google and Yahoo. 

Dr. Marcum also predicted that national libraries are more instrumentally involved in such aggregative projects as the European Library, which provides access to the combined resources of the forty-five national libraries of Europe. She also introduced the recent project in which the Library of Congress has offered to collaborate with other libraries through UNESCO to create a World Digital Library. This library would concentrate on "rare and unique cultural materials" from many different cultures and "work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe." The Library of Congress recently appointed a senior advisor for this project who will direct a team drawn from various parts of the library and will develop a plan for the initial content. She assured us that we will hear more about this project in the near future. 

With these ongoing projects in mind, she envisions that in the future a student in Siberia or Polynesia or anywhere in the world could stay at home and yet browse at leisure through the collections of the Meiji Era materials of the NDL or the historic photographs of Jazz music digitized by the Library of Congress through a UNESCO website or a similar portal drawing on multiple libraries' collections.