Martin Widdra talked about online parliamentary documentation.  They are struggling with a difficult migration to their current parliamentary tracking database, partly because several the databases for several previous parliamentary sessions differ from one another.  He also mentioned the problem of completely different numbering systems that have been applied to various types of documents, with no effective cross-referencing.  An interesting note; Bundestag committee deliberations are not open to the public until after the session is complete, or unless the committee says they can be open and the tapes can be available.

Florian Bless described their system of archiving the parliamentary public website and intranet.  They take a snapshot  of the entire once a month, using software they developed in-house.  The software is open source and they are happy to give the code to other institutions.  The Austrian and Chilean parliaments use it. I asked whether they could name instances in which the archive has been helpful; the snapshots have been done since 2005.  Florian mentioned a time that he needed to look at a job description from three years ago on the intranet.

He described their video and audio archives.  Floor sessions and committee hearings from the mid-90s are kept digitally, but they also have 3500 audio and video recordings from 1944-1994 on magnetic and digital audiotape.  He brought us to see their state-of-the-art broadcasting facilities.  They don’t keep all of their audio/video on servers, but use a tape backup system.  He had chosen a video from 2002 to show the depth of their collection, a film of President George Bush addressing the Bundestag.  It was unexpected, and amusing to many in the group.

Beate Hesterberg talked about the print parliamentary history materials.  I know that many of our legislative history researchers would be thrilled to see similar nicely bound compilations of the bills, bill versions, committee notes, accompanying letters, and background information.  They have 7-1/2 shelf miles of materials.   Their collection is only open to the public by special permission.  Someone asked if they run into the problem of last-minute library users needing access.  No, the librarian replied, potential public users need to make an appointment three days ahead of time, and without it, they won’t even get in the security door.  (This was the one place where they TOOK our passports during our visit. They don’t fool around.)

Ursula Freyschmidt talked about the library.  They have about 9000 periodicals, about 600 of which are official publications. Our library has about 450 periodicals, of which 300 are state publications.  One-third of their budget is devoted on online searching and licensing fees.  They collect some fiction, books by prestigious authors and ones on political themes.  We only have a few books of fiction written by current or former legislators, and only if the authors would like to contribute a copy.  They collect materials from 16 foreign countries and the U.S. and actively collect “gray literature,” reports from nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and other international groups.  They have a collection of 900,000 items, and lend 80,000 items per year.  Materials date from the time of WWII forward.  There used to be a Reichstag Library in a small, older building nearby.  A portion of the collection survived the damage of the war but the East Germans shut the doors and allowed the materials to becomes foxed, deteriorated, unusable.

At the Bundestag they have a press Documentation Division that has maintained an electronic press archive since 1999. Florian Merkel told us about their service. To begin, they have two readers scanning more that 20 newspapers each day and producing a news service of about 60 selected neutral articles for release by 8 a.m.  In all, they add about 800 articles per day to their database. (!) Each article is thoroughly indexed.  In addition to the general press coverage they provide an SDI (selective dissemination of information) service by topic, for each committee, or for articles on each member of parliament.  About 90% of members subscribe to a feed of articles on themselves.  They have copyright agreements with the newspapers, but don’t include any foreign or American press, depending instead on FACTIVA.  He said something about copyright considerations being more difficult in the U.S.

Thanks to Stephen D. Aargha for his shot of the library – much better than the one I took!

On Thursday evening we listened to the experiences of two women who have been active in German politics, both members of the Christian Democratic Party.  Monika Thamm, a member of the House of Representatives of Berlin, was born during the war and is Jewish.  Her father was in a concentration camp, her mother forced to work in a weapons factory.  Because of the deprivation in post-war Berlin and the fact that many relatives were living in one flat, she was sent to Thuringia as a child to live with relatives.  She came back to West Berlin in 1960, when the East German party was pressuring her to join the socialist/communist youth organization.  She became a politician at age 50 after serving a distinguished career as a school principal. At the end of her talk she commented that she feels so incredibly lucky to have lived in Germany during these times.  The comment seemed crazy – members of her family were killed during the holocaust, her family endured great hardships in the years following the war.  During the reception Cy Behroozi asked about her comment.  She explained that she has lived through peaceful times.  Her grandparents lived through WWI, her parents through WWII.  That made sense, and showed a gracious gratefulness.

Her colleague Vera Lengsfeld lived in East Berlin with her staunchly Communist parents.  She came to doubt the East German government as a young girl.  She related the story of falling in love with the “most beautiful boy in Berlin” at 17, the son of the Yugoslavian ambassador.  The Stasi pressured her parents to make her stop seeing him. To Vera, this made no sense, since Yugoslavia was a socialist ally of East Germany.  She became a secret dissident; there were not many.  They wrote clandestinely of their political views. She said that later they discovered that “Stasi agents were the only readers of our secret literature.”  At first she wasn’t terribly afraid of the Stasi, as she knew them as the parents of her friends.  She was thrown out of her job as a teacher at the University.  In the 1980s she met with dissidents in Lutheran churches; Stasi agents were not allowed to arrest people on church grounds.  In 1988, she was thrown out of East Germany.  Immediately following the fall of the wall she was elected to the only freely elected government of East Germany, and after reunification, to the Bundestag. She read her own Stasi file, of course.  Besides careful accounting of her dissident activities, they included remarkable detail of her everyday life, like what soap she used and which lotion.   She said that the opening of the Stasi files revealed the deep criminal nature of the Stasi, with detailed plans to destroy the careers and friendships of citizens, and even to murder them.  She related the story of a friend who read of a plot to kill his whole family.  They had rigged his car to go off the road – that part actually happened but the car’s occupants survived the rollover with few injuries. Vera Lengsfeld discovered after reunification that her husband had been an informal informer for the Stasi and reported on her.  The marriage ended.

A German man and another couple were at the talk and the reception so I felt I should be friendly and talk with them.  The young man was a political aide to Monika Thamm, and the couple was with him.  Wolfgang was with the West German Police Force and worked with the American Military Police for 17 years.  He was also involved in training the East German police following reunification.  After reunification anyone who had worked for the Stasi was not allowed to serve in a civil service position. All applicants had to sign a paper stating whether they had served as official or unofficial Stasi agents.  Once the Stasi files were made public, several of the top ranking policemen turned out to be Stasi after all, and were let go. He told me I really should go to the Stasi prison in East Berlin.  It is open as a museum and the guides are often people who had once been imprisoned.  He related the grisly story he heard from a woman who gave a tour to him and his wife.  I asked Wolfgang whether he’d been to the United States.  He and his wife just returned from a trip to Alaska.  They rented a car in Vancouver, drove up to Alaska, and back down to Calgary, all in 17 days.  They traveled 7,680 kilometers. I commented that he had a lot of time to talk to his wife in the car.  “Oh no,” he assured me, “We were too busy watching wildlife.”  He claimed they saw four bears.

The photo with this post is of Stasi files, courtesy of Stephen D. Vargha.

These photos are courtesy of Stephen D. Vargha, who couldn’t even eat his meal in peace.  “Steve!  Would you get a photo of this cool presentation?” I begged.

I wrote two other posts about Berlin shopping on my weaving blog – mostly because there were references to textiles that I thought my weaving friends would enjoy.  If you like you can read them on the Bound to Weave blog.

The second photo shows a small brass square in the sidewalk.  These memorials are found all over Berlin.  This photo was taken by Steve Vargha, one of our group members who has been a news photographer.  Thank goodness Steve was along to document so much of our trip.  For some reason I thought my Iphone would be an adequate substitute for our really nice camera.  That was such a bad decision – the Iphone battery dies, and the camera doesn’t have a zoom or flash.  What was I thinking?  At any rate, when I post a photo of Steve’s I will note “Courtesy of Stephen D. Vargha,” and send out one more thank you!

We visited the main, large west Berlin site,  a remarkable modern building designed by Hans Scharoun and completed in the 1970s.  It was named a historical monument by the city of Berlin a few years ago.  Our librarian guide was a bit unenthusiastic about the designation, because it means that physical changes needed to upgrade library services are difficult to make and involve a lot of red tape.   The carpet was a horrid neutral khaki/beige color – like dirty sponge moss, a colleague noted.  The librarian said it needed to be changed, and they would have to replace the original.  They could still get it from the manufacturer, at a premium price.

We were standing in the vast reading room areas of the library when our guide mentioned that it was used for the library scenes in the Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire.  It’s my favorite movie, and I immediately recalled the scenes and the setting.  What a great day.  What a great trip.

A thread running through all of our lectures and tours of libraries and archives is how that person or institution was affected by divided Berlin and the years since reunification.  This morning we visited the Library and Documentation Directorate of the German Federal Parliament, located in a very modern building next to the Reichstag and close to the Brandenburg Gate.  Where we sat would have been in the no-mans land between barbed wire and the wall, “where you would have been shot by the East German police,” our host noted.

At lunch a librarian explained that west Berliners would never move to east Berlin, but those who came to west Berlin from other parts of Germany think it’s fine.  She was originally from Bonn, but moved here with her family many years ago.  She lived in west Berlin, and later moved to a renovated neighborhood in east Berlin.  Her west Berlin neighbors couldn’t believe she would move there.  Elderly west Berliners don’t like to go to east Berlin.  Others might not have any problems with visiting great restaurants and shops in east Berlin, but “my bed has to be in west Berlin.”

At lunch on Monday we heard the personal experiences of Dirk Sager, a television journalist who worked in East Germany and Russia during the cold war years.  He felt that his main complaint about East Germany was not the fact there was a separate country but that the East Germans should have rights to free travel outside their country.  “I just want to see Paris once in my life,” a friend said.  Mr. Sager said that during the winter following the fall of the wall, “Trabis,” the East German Trabant cars, were unleashed all over Europe as East Germans took the opportunity to travel.  He was asked whether he was thrilled when the wall came down. (He was working in Russia at the time.)  He was subdued in his answer and said that while he was happy he was also apprehensive.  Was it really going to be able to unfold without violence?

After the anthrax scare, mail was not delivered to the Library of Congress for ten months.  They did, however, get deliveries from the Government Printing Office, so they still received reams of committee reports and other federal documents.  Mark Strattner, who works for the Law Library of Congress, said that he’s sure there is still a trailer-truckload of mail somewhere that didn’t ever get delivered.  In their runs of law books, a few pocket arts and volumes from 2001-2002 are missing.  David Mao, who works for the Congressional Research Service, has noted the same thing in their collection.

Now, before all mail to certain zipcodes surrounding the Capitol is delivered, it is irradiated by people in hazmat suits at a facility in New Jersey.  Mail is delayed at least five days, even FedEx packages. This presents problems for the Library of Congress. Not only are important information resources delayed – the process melts some magazines and all their Commerce Clearing House pocket parts.  They had to change the mail delivery category for CCH pocket parts to “daily newspaper,” to get them around irradiation.  At the irradiation facility they grow cultures from any dust from the mail.  There have been no cases of a live toxin in the ten years this has been underway.  If there is a false positive, requiring quarantine until the process is redone, the LC staff know – then there’s no mail that day.

All mail is inspected.  Because anthrax powder came in envelopes, each envelope is cut open and shaken before delivery.  It can’t be sliced carefully across the top, because sometimes the powder remained sealed in a folded piece of paper, so a corner is cut.  Sometimes this means a neat hole in the center of the enclosed letter.

Being in a sensitive area also means spending a lot of time preparing for possible attacks.  They have elaborate “coop” plans (Continuation of Operations) plans.  All employees will be sealed into buildings for three days in case of an airborne toxic event.  It’s the Shelter in Place, or SIP, program. (Everything has an acronym.) Staff members have “escape hoods,” gas masks in sealed boxes. There are a number of extras on hand for library users caught at the time of an attack.  Plastic for all the windows is waiting to be taped up.  They have portable toilets to be set up that look like big Rubbermaid containers with plastic pup tents to erect around them.  Employees were encouraged to supplement the emergency space food packets they were issued with food from home, but most employees just ate the extra snacks they brought from home.

This only touches on the long conversations this morning about crazy complexity and bureaucracy in federal agencies.  I’m so glad I work for the Minnesota Legislature!

The meal and the company were great.  Gudrun , another German librarian who visited the US last year, mentioned that Germans call  a cell phone a handy, as in “I’ll call you on the handy.”  It is used because a cell phone is handy, and they were surprised to discover that no English speakers use that terminology.  I think we should take it up in Minnesota.  David Mao said that the Chinese character for a cell phone is similar to handy, except it really means it’s related to the hand that holds the phone.

Evelin said that for a few years after the fall of the wall Berliners would look at people and guess whether they came from East Berlin or West Berlin.  One clue was clothing color.  According to Evelin, East Germans didn’t wear clothing with subtle color combinations, but would wear solid bright colors.  Haircuts were another tipoff.  A third was that East Germans carried a distinctive sort of cloth bag.  For years, East Germans lived with intermittent shortages of food and consumer goods; they usually carried cloth bags in case they ran across a something they needed for sale.  Of course those differences are erased now.

On the train ride back we were talking among ourselves when a young man interrupted and said a few times, “I just need to talk.  I’m sorry.”  I think we looked a bit puzzled.  Did he want to talk to us?  He then went into a harangue of all of the riders in the car, most people politely yet studiously ignoring him.  I asked Kristianne what it was all about.  He was a homeless person selling a newspaper.  They have permission from the city, she said, but that she found it very irritating.  I thought is was interesting that the homeless person was so super-polite that he needed to apologize to the Americans.

Mark told me that the Law Library of Congress has a $50,000/year budget for German law materials alone.  They have one of the finest historical collections of East German legal materials.  The main Library of Congress sends $500,000/year on German materials. The Law Library of Congress employs 20 foreign attorneys to research comparative international law for members of Congress.