A Librarian for Congress and the Nation
By Monte Maxwell
Nancy Davenport, a 1969 WVU graduate in political science and economics, has discovered that a career in libraries is far from quiet.
The 30-year veteran of the Library of Congress
plays a daily role in many of the developments affecting 
the United States and the world.
As the library's director of acquisitions, Davenport is dealing
currently with problems related to the anthrax attacks that occurred
last fall-during which an anthrax-laden letter arrived on the
desk of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
"It's affected the Library's acquisitions tremendously," Davenport said.
Fears of contamination from the deadly substance forced the U.S. Postal Service to halt mail delivery to the Library of Congress from October 17 to March 4, resulting in a huge backlog. By early spring, the Postal Service estimated it was holding three million boxes of books destined for the library.
Although mail delivery has resumed, operations have yet to return to normal. Mail is being channeled first to facilities in New Jersey and Ohio for irradiation to destroy any possible contamination. The process, which produces high heat, has been unkind to the fragile materials that go to the nation's library.
"We've received cassettes that look like they've been run over by tractor-trailers because the heat has completely warped them," Davenport said. "We have videocassettes that are completely melted, and microforms that would serve as doorstops. They're completely melted together."
The situation has forced departments from different areas of the library to work together. Davenport has recruited staff from the preservation department to work alongside people in acquisitions. Together, they perform preservation assessment the moment they open a box. "We have to decide at point of entry if the item is fit for the permanent collection of the Library of Congress," she said.
Davenport, who grew up in Morgantown, was introduced to libraries by working in Wise Library for four years as a WVU student. She left WVU for a job at a Pittsburgh bank, but soon decided to earn a master's degree in library science. "From my experience at WVU, I had the sense I could be very successful at it," she said.
The Library of Congress extended a job offer even before Davenport finished graduate school. In Washington, Davenport's first assignment was with the Congressional Research Service (CRS), indexing and abstracting journal articles on defense and foreign affairs by morning, and being a research librarian by afternoon.
She managed all requests that came to the CRS—nearly 1,500 requests per day from lawmakers and their staff. She then advanced to developing training programs in the legislative process for members of Congress. That experience served as a cornerstone to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Congress assembled the bipartisan Frost-Solomon Task Force to offer assistance to national legislative bodies in the newly democratic countries throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Congress asked the CRS to manage the program.
The task required Davenport and a team of librarians and policy analysts to cross the Atlantic twice a month for six years to help the infant democracies establish governing bodies. She was charged with helping to educate lawmakers, staff, and librarians about the importance and use of information to develop structure and laws and to establish a system of transparent government.
"We worked directly with members of parliaments and their staff who did not, in their living memory, know what it was like to be in a democracy," Davenport said. "It was some of the hardest work I have ever done, and some of the most gratifying, because we simply grow up living in a democracy and we take it for granted."
Davenport's success led to her being named director of acquisitions in 1997. In this post, she oversees a staff around the globe who gather materials for the library. The Library of Congress receives more than 20,000 items daily. From that total, it retains only 10,000 pieces for its collection.
Davenport is in her 12th different job at the Library of Congress. That's a fact she believes speaks well of her employer. People at the library can specialize in a particular field or set the horizon as their goal, she said.
"In my case, I've wanted a bigger and bigger picture. So I've been always looking for a job that lets me capitalize on what I know and what I've done," Davenport explained. "I've always had a great job and great career."
Appropriately, Davenport attributes her desire for a career with the Library of Congress to a book, Allen Drury's novel Advise and Consent. In the book, senators are talking about getting background information on a job nominee. They agree to contact the Legislative Reference Service (an earlier name for the CRS) because "they have all the answers."
"I decided I wanted to go where they had all the answers," Davenport said.