'If you're not wired … you just aren't a librarian these days': Edwin Burgess takes Army library from card catalogs to online information sharing

Information Outlook, April, 2006 by Forrest Glenn Spencer

An army may travel on its stomach but it is knowledge and education that will help its commanders fight effectively. A large part of leadership is developed through the combination of classroom lessons and field experience. The U.S. Army understood that when in 1882 it established the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The college was the brainchild of Civil War General William T. Sherman. It educates intermediate-career officers, individuals who will eventually be placed in high-ranking leadership and staff positions at the brigade, divisional, or corps command level. Some of the famed graduates include Generals Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Colin Powell, and Norman Schwarzkopf.

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Along with the college, a library was also built in the 1880s so the student officers would have access to the knowledge and wisdom of field commanders current and past, tacticians and historians, books and monographs, doctoral theses, maps, and photographs. The college's library is known today as the U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Library (CARL). Located inside Eisenhower Hall, the CARL is a modern and comprehensive military science research center. Its director these last five years has been SLA member Edwin B. Burgess.

"I have a collection of 300,000 books and about that many in documents," Burgess said in a recent interview. "We have a secure classified area that we maintain. I've got an extensive digitization program. We do the stuff that normal libraries do--like answer reference questions, maintain the Web page and digital library, catalog, circulation--that sort of thing." Among the military databases, the CARL's Web site includes Lancaster Index, Jane's Online Research, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, and Political Risk Yearbook. For the academic, there are LexisNexis Congressional Universe, Peterson's Online Resource Center, and CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online).

Burgess's staff are all civilians--38 in all, including the part-timers. The students at the college are mostly military officers in the middle period of their careers--around 15 years of service, with the rank of major, typically. About 10 percent to 15 percent of the class is made up of officers from other U.S. The college also admits officers from other countries.

All the students understand they may be faced with a number of missions, from full-scale war to counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, and disaster relief. The library's duty is to make available a complete range of materials reflecting these missions.

Focus on the Soldier

"In this library, and all libraries in the Army, the focus is always the soldier," Burgess said. "Everything we do exists to help the solider be better at what they do. We have a dual mission. We are the college's academic library, and we are the Army's equivalent of a public library for the installation. In the post libraries--lots of soldiers are getting educations, and we would be supporting GEDs, college degrees, supporting family members who are going to grade school, high school, or studying on their own; lots of recreational use, of course. When you're at a base with lots of troops--some of the soldiers would just come in to find a quiet place to rest--away from their sergeant."

Primarily, Burgess's job ensures that the library supports the college, which is a graduate-level institution offering its own degree and supporting a number of people who are taking PhDs from civilian colleges.

"In this particular school we're mainly dealing with officers who are looking forward in working in high command levels," he added. "We do a lot of leadership, military history, tactics, and so forth. The curriculum has changed somewhat to reflect the current environment. We are doing some counterinsurgency, national security and nation-building, a good deal of interagency work: Like how does the soldier who has been deployed conduct himself with the hundreds of nongovernmental agencies that appear in a distressed area or how does he work with the State Department, the CIA, or the British Army or host-country army."

Burgess is proud of his work for the professional soldier. He has been a special librarian connected with the U.S. Army for more than 30 years, and yet he has never served in the armed forces. "When I got out of library school in 1971 there was a protracted period of unemployment during which I sent out numerous resumes, none of which had any effect," Burgess recalled. "I didn't have a lot to offer in terms of experience, except a freshly minted master's degree.

"One of my relatives, as it turned out, was an officer in the Army and stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and heard about a vacancy there. So I applied and got the job: Drudge Second Class, I say jokingly, a professional librarian but at the bottom of the totem pole."

Burgess has been an employee with the DoD on various posts. In the early 1980's he made the transition into special librarianship when he was with the USA Concepts Analysis Agency in Bethesda, Maryland, a technical library specializing in strategy, and then as the systems librarian at Fort Monroe, Virginia, overseeing the acquisition and testing of automated systems for 44 libraries connected with the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).