The Library of Congress is not alone in its struggle to stay on top of humankind's increasing knowledge. By conservative estimate, the holdings of the world's major libraries are doubling in volume every fourteen years. No wonder the Library of Congress is in the forefront of electronic resource copyright issues. As libraries shift their focus from collection to access, electronic storage and retrieval systems will be increasingly important to even the smallest libraries. Being able to leverage off of the Library of Congress will be a dominant goal for smaller libraries that wish to remain relevant.

Putting the Library's information statistics in an even more daunting light is the geometric manner in which information is growing. Various experts state that the amount of information available to us will double every five to ten years, and will continue to double in ever decreasing time spans.

In 1998, Billington and the Library of Congress were moving in a decisive way toward more information for more people. In its latest development push, the Library is adding digitized collections and investing millions in computer access to the world's largest repository of knowledge. This worldwide database may eventually prove to be one of the keystones in man's history of recorded knowledge, rivaling many printed sources, as well as governing and regulatory groups, in influence.

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