Democracy and Our Shared Heritage

How the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives share a common goal: the preservation and improvement of American democracy.

On the evening of June 24, I joined Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, and Dr. Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, at Johns Hopkins University to discuss the role of cultural institutions in sustaining our democracy.

The conversation was wide-ranging, but one overarching theme sticks out in my mind: the three institutions we each lead—the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution—are all direct products of American democracy. Each one safeguards American history and assumes the partial responsibility of informing a citizenry capable of sustaining and improving the democracy that created these institutions to begin with.

As leaders of these venerated institutions, we are charged not merely with improving our respective organizations, but with making the country a better place. All of us offer the public a trusted source—while much of that trust is derived from our longstanding presence on the National Mall, we must hold central the notion that trust is not given but earned.

It is earned in our commitment to tell the whole of history with the highest degree of scholarship. That requires acknowledging the nation as a perpetual work in progress. The National Archives’ decision to add the Emancipation Proclamation to the Rotunda—along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—is emblematic of an evolving and expanding democracy. As Dr. Shogan explained, the Emancipation Proclamation is “the beginning of the story of the realization of freedom.” It is the best American example of a democracy working to reconsider and live up to its founding ideals.

Trust is earned, too, by inviting public audiences behind the scenes and making our record-keeping transparent. One of the most powerful ways we have done that is by inviting the public into our processes. For instance, the Smithsonian and the National Archives worked together to crowdsource transcriptions of Freedmen’s Bureau records—a process that not only digitized hundreds of thousands of documents, but also helped introduce new audiences to the wonder and complexity inherent in history. The Library of Congress relied on the public, too, to transcribe and digitize letters to Abraham Lincoln that had not been read since Lincoln himself received them.

Despite an army of staff and volunteers, all three of these institutions house collections so vast, they will be impossible to digitize, organize, and sift through in their entirety without incorporating artificial intelligence. As we move forward into a new digital age, we will need to better harness technology to make our resources more accessible and useful—all while being cautious to preserve accuracy. That will require striking an elusive balance between tradition and innovation.

That is a delicate and invaluable process—it is also a risky one. Yet I would argue risk is inherent in this line of work: we are in the business of uncovering, preserving, and sharing an unvarnished history with the world.

Throughout my career, I have found the central challenge in the museum world is to figure out how to fight the good fight and still stay alive. If we can be both bold and strategic in our risk-taking, we have a far better chance of revealing the whole of our history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and ensure our democracy lives on for many more generations to come.

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