For several years there has been internal discussion at the Library of Congress on the possibility of saving money by shelving books by size instead of by subject. Many inside and outside the Library are wondering if this means that the Library will be making a shift in its shelving policy. Reference librarians, the Library of Congress unions, and Congressional Research Service staff have all expressed strong opposition to shelving by size at the main buildings. A 1997 Library of Congress report from the working group on reference and research to the task group on shelving arrangement concluded that while shelving by size may be an option at the library's remote storage locations that the shelving of the general collections at the Capitol Hill facilities should, if possible, retain the classified subject arrangement. Some Congressional research staff have noted that they would never have met their deadlines if they had not had been able to look at books in the stacks.
Reference librarians are often able to answer scholars' queries only by going to the stacks.
And a June 11 opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted the negative implications for research that would result from shelving by size and raised the question of whether the Library of Congress of the future will be more like a warehouse than a library. The House is still bogged down in trying to decide how to deal with the 1997 budget caps, having decided several weeks ago that the caps, or the allotments for each of the 13 appropriations subcommittees that had been announced earlier in the spring, were not workable. The House Treasury, Postal Service and General Government Subcommittee Treasury Appropriations Subcommittee marked-up a bill in May using the earlier and now outdated caps. OnLine H-Net subscribers and viewers are invited to redistribute the Washington Updates to colleagues and interested individuals.