The 14th Librarian of Congress was sworn in this week. As the first woman and first African-American to hold the post, Carla Hayden will lead the national library. This exciting information came from ABC News in their article, “Carla Hayden Breaks New Ground as 14th Librarian of Congress.”

Hayden grew up in Chicago and has been the longtime CEO of Baltimore’s library system. She was nominated last year by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate to head the Library of Congress. She will serve a 10-year term, which is another first, as the position had previously been a lifetime appointment.

Hayden was sworn in Wednesday by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, with her hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible. It’s part of the library’s collection and was used by Obama at his inauguration.

Hayden has already shared some of her goals and not surprisingly one of them is to move to digitize precious material in the library’s collection of 162 million items.

 

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.