Wisconsin Digital Collections
The first director of the Legislative Reference Bureau, Charles McCarthy (right), helped make the agency a national model by actively disseminating information to legislators and the public.
David Prosser knows that when interpreting laws, you sometimes have to look beyond the language of the legislation.
“The words don’t always tell you everything,” says Prosser, a former state lawmaker and Supreme Court justice, who retired from the high court in 2016. “In terms of interpreting a constitutional provision, it’s a little bit more than the words. What was motivating the people who passed the constitutional amendment? What was the debate at the time?”
When he served on the Supreme Court, Prosser could always find the backstory at the Legislative Reference Bureau Library, which is located across from the Capitol, above Starbucks at 1 E. Main St.
Prosser has used the library to learn more about legislative context by reviewing government reports that came out around the same time when laws were passed; he has also gone there to read testimony from legislative debates on laws. He still uses the Bureau — as well as the Wisconsin State Law Library — as a resource when writing law review articles. “It makes me look like I know what I’m talking about,” he jokes.
Founded in 1901, the Legislative Reference Bureau (or LRB) is required by state statute to archive many of the documents created by or used by the Legislature.
But librarians who have recently worked in the Bureau say that its mandated task to provide “reference services … equally and impartially” to the Legislature and public is suffering under the current chief, Richard Champagne.
Since Champagne became chief in January 2015, there’s been regular turnover at the LRB’s research and library services department. The department’s staff has shrunk from 14 people to eight. Only three of the employees remain from when Champagne took over.
Earlier this month, Champagne eliminated two of the Bureau’s four librarian positions.
Those librarians and others are raising the alarm about how the Legislative Reference Bureau is handling and maintaining public documents.
“I don’t care about my job,” says Rachel Holtan, one of the two librarians whose position was axed. “I’m worried about the collection, I’m worried about the library. I’m worried that 50 years from now, five years from now, people will be like, ‘What happened?’ and it will be too late.”
The Legislature directed the Free Library Commission in 1901 to create a “working library” in the Capitol, with as “complete as may be, of the several public documents of this and other States.”
Its first director, Charles McCarthy, had grander ideas. “In addition to caring for the materials in his collection, he had turned the library into a help center of sorts for legislators,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. “Traditionally, a library mainly housed knowledge; under McCarthy, the Wisconsin library actively disseminated it.”
The Bureau began researching contemporary issues for lawmakers, citizens and journalists. It became a model for other states and the U.S. Congressional Research Service.
A librarian and researcher who worked for the Bureau for almost 25 years left last year. The person asked that his name not be used because he still works for the state.
The former researcher noticed that the Bureau’s mission to help educate the public fell by the wayside after Champagne took over. “That was an important part of our job, to explain the legislative process,” the person says. “We would help people understand what was going on.”
One of the ways it does that is by publishing “plain language” reviews of laws or court cases, like an analysis of Gill v. Whitford, the state’s gerrymandering case. In 2014, the LRB did 37 of these reports; last year it did just 11.
Perhaps the Bureau’s most recognizable work is the Wisconsin Blue Book, an almanac of state government published every two years. It includes biographies of lawmakers, state history and statistics. The latest edition has 300 fewer pages than previous ones.
The former researcher laments that a lot of statistical information — such as a table showing how much state aid each county receives — is no longer included in the Blue Book.
“There is a belief among the current chief that this data is all available elsewhere and we shouldn’t be publishing it,” the researcher says. “Having compiled statistical data for the Blue Book, yes some of it’s online, but it’s not digestible by the average citizen.”
Another service that’s been eliminated is the Bureau’s press clippings. Since the agency’s founding, library staff has clipped and indexed newspaper and magazine articles — from state and national publications — about Wisconsin government.
After the internet developed, new articles were emailed to a subscription list — and archived on the LRB’s website — as Capital Headlines. This service was discontinued after March 14, 2016.
“We have 120-year heritage of maintaining an archive of news articles, which is basically defunct,” the former researcher says. “I think it’s quite a shame.”
The Legislative Spotlight, a weekly roundup of legislative activity, was discontinued in December 2015.
Walking a reporter through the Legislative Reference Bureau, Champagne says he can remember when it was “a hopping place.”
Champagne was hired as an attorney for the Bureau in 1993 to work on drafting bills for legislators. At the time, the library was located in the Capitol.
“If you wanted to get a copy of a bill, you had to come here,” he says. “We had no internet, we had no computers at all. If you wanted to look at a drafting file, you came here. This was it.”
Times have changed, he says. The Bureau now is putting bills online the same day that the Legislature passes them. Staff also quickly posts drafting documents, he adds.
“The kind of things we provide now, we provide on the internet,” he says. “On average, we have about five people a week [come in].”
Champagne calls the Bureau’s library “a very small part of our operation.”
He has made similar arguments to legislators who inquired about the librarian cuts. “It was a difficult decision, but we did not have enough work to sustain the employment of four full-time librarians,” he wrote in a May 9 email to Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton). “Our remaining two full-time librarians will easily be able to handle the LRB’s library duties, providing information materials to the Legislature, maintaining our state documents collection, and providing public access to legislative materials and state documents. There will be no reduction in our services.”
Although the librarian positions have been axed, Champagne says the LRB is adding staff in other areas. He’s in the process of hiring two attorneys and two policy analysts. This will increase the LRB’s staff to 52, including 20 drafting attorneys.
In its early days, the Bureau broke ground as the first agency in the U.S. to provide “professional, nonpartisan drafting and research services to a state Legislature,” according to a history of the agency published on its 100th anniversary.
The demand on drafting bills is growing, Champagne says — this past session the agency helped draft about 6,000 bills, about 20 percent more than in previous sessions. During legislative sessions, the attorneys work round the clock, tweaking bills and crafting amendments.
Champagne says that technology has simply made managing an archive of information a breeze.
“We provide information, that’s our job. The way that information is provided has changed,” he says. “I can go in my office and get you copy of any law review ever written. I can get you them in a matter of minutes — even though I don’t have them on my shelf.”
When Keely Wrolstad was in library school at UW-Madison, her professors warned her about people like Champagne. “They said this happens all the time.”
Wrolstad, the other librarian whose job was eliminated this month, says that Champagne misunderstands the behind-the-scenes work needed to maintain digital collections and databases.
“We would get many shipments of boxes a month. We process them every month, so our offices weren’t overflowing,” she says. “Because we were working so efficiently, he thought we weren’t doing anything.”
And those materials are being used. While few people now use the physical LRB library, thousands of people access its catalog and digital collection every month, Google Analytics shows.
Wrolstad says the LRB is required by state statute to collect and store numerous state documents. It’s one of three state depository libraries — along with the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Department of Public Instruction — archiving state documents. All three libraries are constantly adding documents to the Wisconsin Digital Archives.
These documents include publications and reports put out by state agencies. Wrolstad catalogued about 2,000 state reports a year. “Some of them are online in various places, but a lot of them aren’t available anywhere,” Wrolstad says.
When documents would come into the library, Wrolstad created a file for them, added search terms so they could be found in databases, and cleaned up metadata. Sometimes this took just a few minutes, other times a few hours.
Wrolstad spent about 30 hours a week cataloging documents and doing database maintenance. Holtan and Wrolstad were also slowly adding older print materials to the digital archive.
“The scanning project alone was enough to keep us busy for the next 40 years,” Wrolstad says.
Holtan and Wrolstad were the only two at the library who knew how to maintain the digital collection. Others could be trained, but it’s a time-consuming process.
The two librarians also noticed that other staff members had marked some print materials to be discarded or offered to other agencies, including documents the LRB was mandated to hold onto.
Champagne denies that his staff is looking to get rid of any materials, other than “ordinary culling of the collection that happens every few decades.”
Holtan and Wrolstad worry that eliminating their positions could spell the end of the LRB's digital archives. They fear that contracts for software might be eliminated, rendering the LRB's Digital Collections inaccessible.
“I’m afraid they’re going to turn off our digital collection,” Holtan says. “Everything we’ve made available to the public will be turned off. It’s part of Wisconsin history that’s important to hang onto.”
Editor's note: This article has been edited to clarify that Holtan and Wrolstad fear the LRB's Digital Collections are in danger, not the Wisconsin Digital Archives, which are maintained by several agencies.
