The Library of Congress belongs to all of us. Not only is it an amazing resource for anyone in the library profession, but it also as an amazing symbol of the value of libraries and national access to, and storage of, information! We are a pretty amazing profession, and the LOC is our professional home.
Check out these Fascinating Facts about the LOC, and click on their page to learn even more!
Origins
The Library was founded in 1800, making it the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation. On August 24, 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building (where the Library was housed) and destroyed the Library’s core collection of 3,000 volumes. On January 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950.
Statistics
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 164 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 38 million books and other printed materials, 3.6 million recordings, 14 million photographs, 5.5 million maps, 8.1 million pieces of sheet music and 70 million manuscripts.
The Collections
The Library receives some 15,000 items each working day and adds approximately 12,000 items to the collections daily. The majority of the collections are received through the Copyright registration process, as the Library is home to the U.S. Copyright Office. Materials are also acquired through gift, purchase, other government agencies (state, local and federal), Cataloging in Publication (a pre-publication arrangement with publishers) and exchange with libraries in the United States and abroad. Items not selected for the collections or other internal purposes are used in the Library’s national and international exchange programs. Through these exchanges the Library acquires material that would not be available otherwise. The remaining items are made available to other federal agencies and are then available for donation to educational institutions, public bodies and nonprofit tax-exempt organizations in the United States.
International Collections
Since 1962, the Library of Congress has maintained offices abroad to acquire, catalog and preserve library and research materials from countries where such materials are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisitions methods. Overseas offices in New Delhi (India), Cairo (Egypt), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Jakarta (Indonesia), Nairobi (Kenya) and Islamabad (Pakistan) collectively acquire materials from more than 60 countries and acquire materials on behalf of United States libraries participating in the Cooperative Acquisitions Program. The Library is also collaborating with institutions around the globe to provide content on theWorld Digital Library.
Foreign Languages
Approximately half of the Library’s book and serial collections are in languages other than English. The collections contain materials in some 470 languages.
African and Middle Eastern Materials
The Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division holds 600,000 volumes in the non-Roman script languages of the region.
Asian Materials
The Library’s Asian Division collection holds more than 3 million items, the largest assemblage of Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials outside of Asia, and one of the largest Tibetan collections in the world.
European, Iberian, Latin American and Caribbean Materials
The Library holds the largest collection of Russian-language materials in the United States and the largest outside of Russia (more than 750,000 items). The Library’s Iberian, Latin American and Caribbean collections, comprising more than 10 million items (books, journals, newspapers, maps, manuscripts, photographs, posters, recordings, sheet music and other materials) are the largest and most complete in the world.
Law Library
The Law Library of Congress is the world’s largest law library, with more than 2.9 million volumes, including one of the world’s best rare law book collections and the most complete collection of foreign legal gazettes in the United States. The Law Library contains United States congressional publications dating back to the nation’s founding.
Rare Books and Manuscripts
The Library holds the largest rare-book collection in North America (more than 700,000 volumes), including the largest collection of 15th-century books in the Western Hemisphere. The collection also includes the first known book printed in North America, “The Bay Psalm Book” (1640).
Children’s Books
The Library possesses approximately 100 extremely rare children’s books, including “The Children’s New Play-Thing” (Philadelphia, 1763) and “The Children’s Bible” (Philadelphia, 1763).
Smallest Book
The smallest book in the Library of Congress is “Old King Cole.” It is 1/25” x 1/25”, or about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
Largest Book
The largest book in the Library of Congress is a 5-by-7 foot book featuring color images of Bhutan. With support from Microsoft, a team of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recorded the ancient life and culture in this Southeast Asian country and made 40,000 digital images available to the Bhutan National Archives. A copy of the picture book was donated to the Library of Congress.
Oldest Example of Printing
One of the oldest examples of printing in the world – passages from a Buddhist sutra, or discourse, printed in 770 A.D. – is housed in the Library’s Asian Division. The oldest written material in the Library is a cuneiform tablet dating from 2040 B.C.
Presidential Papers
Foremost among the Manuscript Division’s holdings are the papers of 23 presidents, ranging from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.
Gutenberg Bible
The Gutenberg Bible, one of the treasures of the Library of Congress, was purchased in 1930. The 15th-century work is one of three perfect copies on vellum in the world.”