 Hello, I'm Natalie Brutus-Smith, Director of Digital Strategy in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Library of Congress. With me are Carly Morse, Management and Program Analysts in the Library's Strategic Planning and Performance Management Office, and Leah Wynn with Grossgau, Senior Program Advisor to the Director of Digital Strategy. We're here to talk about the recent strategic plan launched by the Library of Congress. Beginning in October 2023 and for the next five years, we moved from a separate digital strategy and a strategic plan to one integrated plan with a digital embedded throughout. Carly, Leah and I are excited to share with you how the Library baked digital into the Library's strategic plan. What we're doing to make the plan come alive and how we think this digitally infused strategic plan will help the library keep pace with a quickly changing world. The Library of Congress is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. We are the largest library in the world with over 174 million items and over 470 languages. For almost 100 years, we've provided braille and audiobooks to the blind and prints disabled and built a collection of five and a half million cartographic materials, the largest collection in the world. We still receive more than 1500 physical items each workday. The digital specifically data is increasing by leaps and bounds each year at the library. We manage 174 total petabytes of data, over 210 library IT systems and 2700 physical and virtual servers. In physical year 2022, we added 76 digital collections and had a total of 618 million library website page views. The importance of digital to the library means that we've had to acknowledge and plan for our digital future throughout the library with the thought of how the digital can open opportunities and help shape what we do. As I mentioned over, prior to late 2023, we had a separate digital strategy and strategic plan. For our 2024 to 2028 strategic plan, we work with staff across the library to combine these documents into one that showcases our organizational maturity with digital as a thread we pulled throughout the library's strategic thinking. Now I'll turn this over to Carly Morse from the library's Office of Strategic Planning and Performance Management. She'll talk about the strategic planning process and where we ended up. Thanks, Natalie. That's right. And I wanted to add that our previous strategic plan was structured to focus on priorities and commitments that resonated with all parts of the library. Priorities that were as relevant to the US Copyright Office as to the Congressional Research Service, our library services units and our operations and chief information office. We've carried a lot of that plan forward that is relevant to digital, including our commitment to become more user centered, working in service to users of today and those of tomorrow. In October 2023, we launched the library's new strategic plan for fiscal 2024 to 2028, a library for all. Importantly, this plan builds from our previous plan, starting with our mission statement, which remains to engage, inspire and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity. Our vast and expanding collections engage intellect, cultivate curiosity and spark creativity. They reveal the stories of our nation and connect us with the world. We have also retained our aspirational vision statement, which envisions a future where all Americans are connected to the Library of Congress. A major difference with this new plan, though, is that we no longer have a separate digital strategy. As the Librarian of Congress and our Chief Information Officer like to say, digital is baked in to everything we do. First, incorporating digital considerations throughout the plan reinforces our commitment to elevating, embracing and integrating digital into everything we do and doing so in a strategic, trustworthy and approachable way. Next, continuing our user centered approach by prioritizing first understanding and then meeting the needs, wants and expectations of our users. First and foremost, Congress with our collections, services and experiences. And also thoughtfully using data and analytics to provide valuable insights into the behaviors, preferences and needs of communities and helps us improve their experiences as users while maximizing the impact of our resources and services. Other strategic themes also touch on the digital. The first to prioritize an environment that is inclusive and welcoming for everyone, leveraging the value of different voices, experiences and cultures and telling a more complete national story. As well to leverage collaborations and partnerships to tap into a broader network of expertise, collections and resources that can help expand the library's reach and amplify our impact. And lastly, to focus on community engagement, building valuable insights into our user community needs, interests and aspirations so that we can develop programs, services and resources that resonate with and meet the unique needs of diverse user communities. Now I'll turn things over to Leah to talk about our planning for the digital, known and unknown. Thanks, Carly. So as Carly said, our new goals now fully encompass the library's digital strategy, recognizing that in today's context, the contributions of digital technology permeate our work throughout the library and all of our goals. But what does this mean in practice, both in terms of identifying digital components of our strategic plan, and how we tell the stories of digital transformation connected to that strategic plan. Back when we were looking at revising and enhancing our strategic plan and moving from a separate to an integrated digital strategy, we asked, how can we ensure that digital is instrumental, visible and measurable. The strategic planning group at the library discussed what we wanted to enable with the strategic plan. They discussed how we want the digital strategy of the agency to be visible to Congress, the American people and ourselves, and they asked how would we measure our digital progress. Now we've tried to define what we mean by digital. It means more than working online or with technology. It encompasses seems like collaboration, inclusiveness, resilience and creativity, and it touches on mostly everything that we do, and that we want to do. So as Carly mentioned, we now have four high level agency strategic goals. Digital strategy is important to each of them. The first two goals are retained from our last plan, expand access and enhance services. In these goals, digital really comes into play in making our collections, experts and services available and creating valuable experiences for every user. We think about these in some ways as representing the ends where we hope to get for our users and audiences. The second set of goals is a little bit more like the means, strengthening capacity, meaning supporting our staff and strengthening our operations. This goal in the digital sense includes the objective of developing staff capabilities with an emphasis on digital skills, as well as optimizing operations and systems for improved performance, certainly digital strategy elements. And finally, fostering innovation, which means exploring new approaches and emerging technologies to address challenges and spark creativity. This fourth goal is the newest and it's an area where we mean all sorts of innovation, not just digital. People are innovative across fields and innovation is not just AI or emerging technologies. It's new ways of working. Our objectives with this goal include inviting curiosity and experimentation, meeting evolving challenges, innovating and using data. This is a key place where progress is inspired and where we can catalyze our digital transformation for the future. We want to be able to inspire and capture the library's digital progress, not only in fostering innovation, but in all four goals. Now that the strategic plan is launched, we've moved into the next phase of our work, using library wide unit level planning processes to make the plan come alive. We've surfaced concepts related to digitally driven or digitally based progress. We're seeing emerge across the four goals. For example, how we're strengthening digital accessibility, delivering digital content, cultivating digital skills and improving digital operations. We plan to use these concepts to capture our digital transformation and tell stories about where the library is and where it's going as part of the community of libraries using engaging with emerging technologies and connecting with communities of users. Our next step is to tell these stories of digital strategy across the organization. Many organizations are telling stories about their collections and we are too, but we're also experimenting with different ways of describing digital strategy progress transformation with graphics videos and other narrative and visual tools. With our new strategic plan, we want to draw upon stories of digital maturity from across the library and beyond to describe our work within the fast moving ecosystem we're a part of. We want the library to be able to discuss work that's already being done and to predict what will come next. We're looking forward to these next steps of working across the library to examine and shape how we talk about digital transformation and progress here at the library. Thank you for your attention to this talk. You can see a source of more information in the library strategic plan at this URL, as well as our names and contact information here. Thank you.