The Library of Congress this week quietly ended dedicated reference service for Local History and Genealogy after eighty-eight years of continuous service across multiple locations.
The Library’s first Local History and Genealogy Reading Room opened in temporary space in the Summer of 1935. As described in the Annual Report of the following year:
To provide a more adequate service for those coming to the Library from all parts of the United States to consult our unusually large and important collections of genealogy (including state and local history ) and to throw proper safeguards about these collections, large portions of which are irreplaceable[,] … the C-CT (including genealogy) and F 1-999 (American local history) [call number] classes were combined on deck 47, and space was cleared for approximately 50 readers’ desks, for a reference collection of about 5,000 volumes, and for the necessary card indexes. Two assistants are continuously on duty in this special reading room from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; it was opened to the public in August 1935 (Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress, 1936, pp. 270-71).
The new reading room, “the success of which was assured before its start,” the report continues, “has, during the first brief year of its operation, eminently justified itself by unexpected and additional benefits which are attested not only in our administration of the collection but by wholly disinterested users of the material. (Annual Report…, 1936, pp. 271-72).
Given its success, just four years later Local History and Genealogy received a new home in the Library’s recently-opened Adams Building (then known as the Annex):
On March 11, 1940, this section was removed from its temporary location on Deck 47 in the Main Building where for 6 years it had rendered service despite the inadequacies of its quarters, to a suite of three rooms adjoining the west side of the North Reading Room in the Annex. Two of the rooms are devoted to the special reference collection of about 2,500 volumes, and to the special catalogs of United States local history, heraldry, genealogy, American biography, and related subjects. The third room is used as an office by the assistant in-charge. Books are served to readers at the tables in the North Reading Room (Annual Report…, 1940, p. 207).
The next move came more than four decades later, after the 1981 opening of the Library’s Madison Building:
A different kind of Madison Building dividend matured in December 1981 when the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room was relocated from the Adams to the Jefferson Building, to occupy space formerly assigned to the Law Library…. The Library had been led to place the original [1935] reading room on Deck 47 in order to bring readers close to materials most in demand and to safeguard them because of their rarity. The same motives are satisfied in the new location, which has ample shelving and controlled access to the adjoining decks where local history classes are now shelved. (Annual Report…, 1982, p. 71).
This iteration of the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room was “located on the northeast side of the second floor of the Thomas Jefferson (LJ) Building. Hours of service [were] 8:30 A.M. to 9:30 P.M., Monday through Friday, 8:30A.M. to 5:00 P.M. on Saturday and 1 to 5 P.M. on Sunday” (Andrusko, Reid, Wood, and Austin, “Genealogical Research at the Library of Congress,” Library Trends, Summer 1983, p. 52). With one more move, the final independent location for Local History and Genealogy was on the ground floor of the Jefferson Building. “However,” to quote the authors of the LC Encyclopedia, “wherever it has been located, it has always has been one of the Library’s busiest reading rooms” (Cole, Aiken, eds., Encyclopedia of the Library of Congress (2005), p. 319).
In November of 2013, the ground floor Local History and Genealogy Reading Room, LJ-G42, was closed and its reference collections were moved into the Main Reading Room (primarily on Deck 7) as part of the ill-fated I-900 Project. For the first time since 1935, the reference collection was not adjacent to the reference librarians, making it difficult for patrons to consult with reference staff about information in the reference books—which are especially crucial for genealogy research. Despite a promise in the 2013 Memorandum of Understanding governing the relocation of Local History and Genealogy into the Main Reading Room that Alcove 3 in the reading room would be glassed in to create a separate consultation area for Local History and Genealogy (“Memorandum of Understanding, Local History and Genealogy Service Relocation,” November 19, 2013), this consultation area never materialized.
Since November 2013, one of the four reference desks in the Reference Assistance Room (RAR) just inside the researcher’s entrance to the Main Reading Room, had been dedicated to Local History and Genealogy Reference, and staffed from 10:00 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, all day on Saturday, and on some evenings as part of a rotation of librarians from MRR and LH&G.
The Local History and Genealogy collections at the Library of Congress serve a special constituency. Many who use the genealogy collections are often the “everyman” and “everywoman” of ordinary daily life—that is, they are not the project-oriented scholar researchers who draw on other parts of the vast Library of Congress collections (though scholar researchers certainly use the Local History and Genealogy collections too). Genealogical research holds wide appeal to a broad swath of the American public, and its popularity has only continued to grow across the decades. This is an especially relevant characteristic since the Library’s Strategic Plan seeks to entice visitors to become researchers via engagement with the collections (“Enriching the Library Experience: The FY2019-2023 Strategic Plan of the Library of Congress”).
Local History and Genealogy’s consistent and continuous reference service has provided researchers with advice, interpretation, and suggested research strategies from trained reference specialists knowledgeable about the Library of Congress local history and genealogy collections and how best to use them, as well as the many specialized collections that could be used to answer specific local history and genealogy questions. In addition, casual visitors and experienced researchers alike have been drawn to the Local History and Gnealogy desk to ask questions about researching their own families and histories. Many had no idea that the largest research library in the country also had such a large and important local history and genealogy collection, and that it was open to research by all.
This eighty-eight-year history of consistent local history and genealogy reference service came to an end on April 7, 2023. Beginning Monday April 10, 2023, as a result of staffing shortages and changing conditions in reference services in the Main Reading Room—and amidst congressional requests for the Library to emphasize providing access to the room for visitors during research hours, the Researcher and Reference Services Division combined the Local History and Genealogy reference librarians into the single regular rotation of reference librarians for the Main Reading Room desk.
As a result, dedicated reference service for Local History and Genealogy is no longer regularly provided for one of the world’s greatest collections of local history and genealogy materials, for the first time since 1935.
Mark F. Hall
Guild Chief Negotiator
Anne K. Toohey
Guild President
