People, Buildings, and Collections: Innovations in Security and Preservation
Kenneth E. Lopez
Director of Security, Library of Congress

Building a successful security program to protect facilities, staff and visitors, and collections requires a high degree of collaboration across a wide variety of disciplines and organizations within an institution. Working from the top down, with a commitment to support the institution s mission and to seek collaboration across the board, an institution can find innovative ways to meet the challenge of balancing access and protection and finding an appropriate position on the continuum of too little or too much security. At the Library of Congress, entities across the board have collaborated to build an effective security program based on a common language and framework and an integrated approach to implementation of security controls in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

This paper describes the Library of Congress s security program developed since 1997. In that year, the Library hired its first director of security, to centralize and coordinate security planning. To protect the Library s collections its heritage assets the new Office of Security joined with the Collections Security Oversight Committee (representing all the Library s major entities) to develop an innovative security planning framework based on security best practices applied to the Library s disparate elements. The 1997 security plan primarily focused on physical security controls for the collections and created a protection prioritization scheme of five tiers of risk and four collections cycles (in process, in storage, in use, and in transit). Since then, the Library has integrated preservation, bibliographic, and inventory controls into the framework and has added a fifth cycle (on exhibit).

The paper also addresses major physical security enhancements funded under an emergency appropriation in 1998 in response to the shootings of U.S. Capitol Police officers at the Capitol and the embassy bombings in Africa. These enhancements are based on an analysis of needs developed in the 1997 security plan, implemented on an accelerated schedule. As a public institution located in our nation's capital, the Library has the obligation to provide access to our cultural heritage and at the same time to protect the people against the threat of physical harm. By having a fully integrated security planning framework, the Library can make cost-effective decisions about implementing security controls and present budget requests for those improvements to its funder, the U.S. Congress.