Library of Congress Strategic Plan: Four Goals and Digital Strategy

The Library of Congress strategic plan for fiscal years 2024 through 2028, titled A Library for All, was released in October 2023 and organizes the institution’s work around four goals: expanding access, enhancing services, strengthening capacity, and fostering innovation. Its stated vision is that “All Americans are connected to the Library of Congress,” and its mission is to “engage, inspire, and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity.”¹ The plan’s defining feature is that digital strategy is no longer a separate document; it runs through every goal.²

Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress, authored the plan’s opening message and framed the institution as “a library for everyone.” Her central argument is that “it is not enough to collect and preserve”; the collections must be actively used. The plan describes a “decisive shift to be more user centered, digitally enabled, and data driven.”³

The Four Goals

Expand Access

The first goal commits the Library to making its collections, experts, and services available “when, where, and how users need them.” Its objectives are to increase the discoverability and availability of holdings, to build collections that “reflect the breadth, diversity, experiences and needs of the American people,” to sustain long-term access through conservation and preservation, and to engage visitors through both digital and physical spaces.⁴

Enhance Services

The second goal aims for “lifelong connections” between users and the Library. It directs staff to understand and engage communities, enhance digital services for diverse needs, and collaborate with partners to reach new audiences.⁴ Service to Congress sits at the center of this work. The plan identifies legislative service as “the foundation for the Library’s mission,” delivered through the Congressional Research Service, the Law Library of Congress, the U.S. Copyright Office, and the Federal Research Division, which provide analysis, policy consultations, and briefings to members and staff.¹

Strengthen Capacity

The third goal calls staff “the heart of the Library” and turns inward. Its objectives cover supporting a flexible, diverse workforce; developing staff capabilities with an emphasis on digital skills; promoting a safe, fair, inclusive, and collaborative environment; and optimizing systems to deliver cost-efficient, modern infrastructure.⁴

Foster Innovation

The fourth goal directs the Library to experiment with emerging technologies, explore new ways for users to interact with collections, and use data analysis to guide programs. This is the goal most directly concerned with artificial intelligence and other technologies the plan acknowledges could “disrupt and revolutionize” how the Library works.²

Digital Strategy Runs Through Every Goal

The previous plan, covering fiscal years 2019 through 2023, came with a standalone digital strategy document. The current plan eliminates that separation, making digital methods central to each of the four goals.²

The Library’s Digital Strategy Directorate focuses on three areas: digital strategy, emerging technologies, and communities. On the infrastructure side, the institution is approaching 200 petabytes of data, with nearly 25 million records available online.⁵

Artificial intelligence is a stated priority. The Library has been experimenting with machine learning since 2018, and in 2024 it adopted a formal definition of AI along with six guiding principles covering trust, public benefit, accountability, equity, IT security, and the protection of rights. Current AI uses include extracting data from historic copyright registration records, geotagging legislative content, creating machine-readable maps, segmenting image and audio files, enhancing reader recommendations, and monitoring IT security.⁶

A pilot called Exploring Computational Description is testing whether machine learning can automate parts of cataloging. Large language models reached up to 90 percent accuracy for certain catalog fields but only 26 percent for predicting Library of Congress Subject Headings, which the Library cites as support for its “humans in the loop” approach, where staff review AI-generated output before it goes live.⁷

What the Plan Funds

The Library ties its annual budget requests directly to the plan’s goals. The FY 2026 Congressional Budget Justification requests $946.2 million total, with $22.9 million in programmatic increases linked to plan objectives. The larger new items include:

$5.4 million to replace legacy tape-based storage with cloud-compatible object storage
$3.7 million to continue modernizing digital collections infrastructure
$3.5 million to expand the Congressional Research Service’s data analysis and AI capabilities
$2.5 million to migrate Congress.gov, loc.gov, and copyright.gov to commercial cloud environments
$6.8 million to accelerate deployment of the U.S. Copyright Office’s Registration System, with full Enterprise Copyright System operation expected by FY 2028

The FY 2025 request had earlier included $3.3 million for digital collections processing capacity, $3.5 million for CRS data analytics, $1.5 million for a digital accessibility program, and $725,000 for collections handling in newly expanded public spaces of the Thomas Jefferson Building.⁸⁹

Physical space is part of the same effort. The David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery opened in June 2024 as the first piece of a broader visitor-experience initiative in the Jefferson Building, funded with $40 million in congressional appropriations and $30 million in private donations. Additional galleries, an education center, and a café remain in development.¹⁰

How Progress Is Tracked

The Library uses what it calls an “integrated planning, performance and risk management framework.” Each service unit develops its own directional plan with metrics aligned to agency-wide objectives, and the Strategic Planning and Performance Management Office reviews targets quarterly and reports results to executive and operations committees. An annual accomplishments report goes to Congress and the public.¹¹

A June 2024 evaluation from the Inspector General’s office, conducted by Sikich CPA LLC, found gaps. The Library had developed 87 key performance indicators aligned to three of the four goals, but none for “Foster Innovation.” The process for building KPI dashboards was manual, and service units were not consistently identifying risks tied to their performance goals. The IG issued five recommendations, all accepted by management. Strategic planning has appeared on the Inspector General’s list of top management challenges in every semiannual report since September 2011.¹²¹³

An Enterprise Planning and Management software system had been expected to automate performance tracking by September 2025. The FY 2026 budget removes $460,000 in expansion funding as a non-recurring cost and does not describe the system as operational.⁸

How This Plan Fits the Previous One

The FY 2024–2028 plan builds on Enriching the Library Experience, the FY 2019–2023 plan released October 1, 2018. Under that earlier plan, the Library digitized millions of items, including the papers of 23 U.S. presidents from George Washington through Calvin Coolidge, established a centralized digitization program, deployed its first risk management framework, and passed a $20 million private philanthropy goal for the visitor experience. The current plan carries those accomplishments forward and adds objectives that reflect the institution’s growth over the intervening five years.¹⁴

1
Library of Congress. A Library for All: The FY2024–2028 Strategic Plan
2
Library of Congress. Strategic Plan 2.0
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Library of Congress. FY 2024 Agency Financial Report
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Library of Congress. Goals and Objectives
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Library of Congress. Digital Strategy
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Library of Congress. Artificial Intelligence at the Library of Congress
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Library of Congress. Could Artificial Intelligence Help Catalog Thousands of Digital Library Books
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Library of Congress. FY 2026 Congressional Budget Justification
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Library of Congress. FY 2025 Congressional Budget Justification
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Library of Congress. A Library for You
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Library of Congress. Plan Implementation
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Library of Congress. Strategic Planning Evaluation Report
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Library of Congress. Semiannual Report – September 2024
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Library of Congress. Our Progress