The Library of Congress draws more than 15 million visits per month to its digital spaces, a figure Natalie Buda Smith — the Library’s Director of Digital Strategy — used to illustrate just how far the institution has moved into the digital age.
Natalie Buda Smith’s integrated digital strategy
Speaking in a conversation with Federal News Network’s Jory Heckman and during a webinar with Evan Davis, Executive Managing Director for Strategic Growth at Maximus, Buda Smith described a deliberate shift: digital is no longer a separate workstream at the Library of Congress (LOC); it is embedded across every line of work. “All of our workstreams are becoming more digital,” she told Heckman, adding that “Needs are changing quickly, and we can respond to that change at speed [with an integrated] strategic plan.”
The phrasing signals a strategic choice: rather than bolt digital projects onto existing programs, the LOC has reimagined planning so that digital capabilities are native to mission delivery.
The Library’s four goals and how they map to citizens and staff
Buda Smith framed the Library’s mission in operational terms: to serve Congress and the American people through four explicit goals — expand access, enhance services, strengthen capacity, and foster innovation. She said the first two goals are intended to drive citizen engagement and experience, while the latter two are designed to support LOC staff in delivering those citizen-facing improvements.
“Our mission is to help people understand American history and who we are as Americans,” Buda Smith explained, and one of the “principal ways we can achieve this is by extending our digital collections and access to them.” That linkage — mission to measurable goals to digital execution — underpins the LOC’s public-facing posture.
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See what we buildAPIs and AI: alternative routes into the collection
Buda Smith rejected a website-centric view of access. “People want access to information in new ways,” she said. “You’ve got AI, and people are building APIs, and they want to hook into the information. We’re responding by giving them access to information in new ways, like APIs.”
On the technology front, she articulated a conservative, high-benefit approach to artificial intelligence: “We’re finding the best use of AI is processing materials and collections,” she said. “Using AI to help with the process is effective, low risk, and really helps us deliver more to the American people.” The emphasis is on AI as an efficiency multiplier for internal processing that expands what the Library can deliver externally.
Evan Davis on the “digital front door” and customer expectations
For Evan Davis, the “digital front door” is not a metaphor for a single website but a broader set of entry points that let people self-serve and navigate complex collections. “It’s about meeting customers where they are and interacting with them in their preferred means,” he said, urging agencies to rely on the “digital access, particularly on mobile devices and tablets” that most citizens carry.
Davis predicted operational gains from the approach: “The future of service delivery, of interacting with constituents — that future is going to be cheaper, and it’s going to be faster and easier to understand.” In the LOC’s case, that future is already manifest in heavy monthly digital traffic and a strategy that prioritizes mobile-friendly, API-accessible interactions.
What this means for technologists, procurement leaders, and the public
- Technologists and security teams: Expect to prioritize tooling that prepares collections for automated processing (the area Buda Smith identified as AI’s best use) and to design APIs that enable external developers to “hook into” Library resources without relying solely on the website.
- Procurement and investment planners: The LOC’s integrated plan links investments to four concrete goals; procurement leaders will be watching for procurement strategies that fund platform-level access (APIs, processing pipelines) rather than one-off web features.
- The public and researchers: The result is more ways to reach primary source material — direct API access, improved mobile experiences, and AI-assisted processing that makes collections easier to search and use.
The Library of Congress presents a specific model: an integrated strategic plan, a focus on extendable access (APIs), and a narrowly applied use of AI to unlock collections. With more than 15 million monthly digital visits as the backdrop, the LOC’s approach ties organizational capacity to measurable public benefit. The remaining question is operational: how widely and quickly will other agencies embrace a similarly native digital posture that treats the “digital front door” as a platform rather than a page?
Source: Agencies are Opening the Digital Front Door to Exceptional Citizen Experiences
