Leah Weinryb Grohsgal
Senior Program Advisor to the Director of Digital Strategy
Library of Congress
Natalie Buda Smith
Digital Strategy Director
Library of Congress
Carly Morse
Management and Program Analyst, Strategic Planning and Performance Management
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress unveiled a new five-year strategic plan in October 2023. For the first time, the plan has digital strategy embedded throughout, rather than being represented in a separate document. Encompassing the scope of current work and future possibility for a large, digital-forward organization in a strategic plan was a challenge. This briefing will describe how we sought to be both comprehensive and agile in our planning, and how we hope the new plan will allow us to adapt existing strategy and governance structures to explore new technologies and digital methodologies. The Library holds vast and growing digital collections of the nation’s cultural and intellectual heritage materials, and has long explored new technologies and methodologies in information science. Because of our position stewarding collection materials, serving as a research arm of Congress through the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and Law Library, and housing the United States Copyright Office (USCO), our approach includes both experimentation in the promise of making resources available and caution about the implications of new technologies and methodologies. As both the abundance if data in our care and popular interest in these technologies grow, consideration of new approaches, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, becomes more pressing and new technology disrupts and revolutionizes many aspects of our work. This session will address the connections between strategy and planning in making real-world decisions.