Carla Hayden

Carla Hayden (born August 10, 1952, Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.) is an American librarian who, in 2016, became the first woman and the first African American to serve as the Librarian of Congress. She is also known for defending library users’ privacy and for her efforts to ensure widespread access to public libraries and their resources.

Hayden attended Roosevelt University in Chicago (B.A., political science, 1973), and she earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Chicago Graduate Library School (1977, 1987). She began her professional career in 1973 (while still in school) as a children’s librarian in the Chicago Public Library (CPL) system and maintained other positions within CPL through 1982. She spent the five years following as the library services coordinator for Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. She served as an assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh from 1987 to 1991. As a professor of library science, she focused on children’s literature and library resources. In 1991 she returned to Chicago, where she was appointed deputy commissioner and chief librarian of CPL, a position overseeing that city’s entire public library system that she held until 1993.

That year she became the head of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Baltimore library system. She advanced the Baltimore library system into the digital age, greatly expanding the library’s digital resources, increasing the number of computers available to the public, and opening an after-school centre for teens. During her tenure with the Baltimore library, she oversaw the opening of the system’s first new branch in more than three decades. In spring 2015 Hayden was praised for keeping the libraries open during the civil unrest that followed the police shooting of Freddie Gray. She served as president of the American Library Association in 2003 and 2004.

In February 2016 U.S. Pres. Barack Obama nominated Hayden for the position of Librarian of Congress. She was confirmed by a vote of 74 to 18 in Congress, indicating that members of the Republican Party recalled her vocal opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act (2001), which included a controversial section that granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) access to library card holders’ records. She became the 14th Librarian of Congress since the library was established in 1800 and the first professional librarian to hold the position since 1974; her two most recent predecessors were historians, and her immediate predecessor, James Billington (served 1987–2015), was harshly criticized for neglecting to take the measures necessary to modernize the Library of Congress. Hayden was the first Librarian of Congress under the new 10-year term limit (with the option for reappointment) enacted by President Obama; until 2016 the position had been a lifetime appointment.