"Library of Congress"

 

It's the biggest library in the world. There are three buildings on Capitol Hill where the Library of Congress is. Originally, the Library of Congress was housed in the Thomas Jefferson Building (1897). There's a John Adams Building and a James Madison Memorial Building. The Library opened in 1800 inside the U.S. Capitol. There's also the High-Density Storage Facility (2002) at Fort Meade, Md., and the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation (2007) in Culpeper, Va (loc.org).

Collections

There's nothing like the Library of Congress today. This collection has millions of cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; millions of manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's biggest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music, and sound recordings. Circulated more than 22.3 million copies of braille, audio, and large-print items to blind and print-disabled patrons; Circulated 243,700 physical items for use inside and outside the Library; Performed approximately 8.7 million preservation actions on items in the Library’s physical collections, with an additional 5.7 million pages of materials prepared and shipped to vendors for preservation and reformatting services; Recorded more than 175.77 million items in its collection:

• There are more than 25.49 million cataloged books at the Library of Congress

• There are more than 15.87 million unclassified print items, including books with large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs, bound newspapers, pamphlets, music, technical reports and more.

• Non-classified (special) collections have more than 134.4 million items, including:

o 4.2 million audio materials

o 77 million manuscripts

O 5.8 million maps

O 17.5 million microforms

o 1.8 million moving images

o 8.2 million music sheets

o 15.2 million photographs

o 864,000 posters, prints, and drawings

There are 2 million items, including machine-readable ones, and employ 3,172 permanent staff members in the library.