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Library of Congress

The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., that serves as the library and research service of the U.S. Congress and the de facto national library of the United States.[3] Founded in 1800, the library is the United States's oldest federal cultural institution.[4] The library is housed in three elaborate buildings on Capitol Hill. It also maintains a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia.[5] The library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world.[3][6] Its collections contain approximately 173 million items, and it has more than 3,000 employees. Its collections are "universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages".[4]

This article is about the United States Library of Congress. For other uses, see Library of Congress (disambiguation).

Library of Congress

April 24, 1800 (April 24, 1800)

173 million items[a]

Onsite use only

Congress, citizens, and international visitors

$802.128 million[2]

3,105[2]

Congress moved to Washington, D.C., in 1800 after holding sessions for eleven years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia. In both cities, members of the U.S. Congress had access to the sizable collections of the New York Society Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia.[7] In Washington, the library was housed in the United States Capitol for almost all of the 19th century. Much of the library's original collection was burnt by British forces during the War of 1812. Congress then purchased Thomas Jefferson's entire personal collection of 6,487 books to restore its own collection. Over the next few years, its collection slowly grew; in 1851, another fire broke out in the Capitol chambers. This destroyed a large amount of the collection, including many of Jefferson's books.


After the American Civil War, the importance of the Library of Congress for legislative research increased and there was a campaign to purchase replacement copies for volumes for its lost books. The library received the right of transference of all copyrighted works, and deposit of two copies of books, maps, illustrations, and diagrams printed in the United States. The Library also built its collections through acquisitions and donations. Between 1888 and 1894, Congress constructed and moved the collection to a large adjacent library building, now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the Capitol. Two more adjacent library buildings, the John Adams Building, built in the 1930s, and the James Madison Memorial Building, built in the 1970s, hold expanded parts of the collection and provide space for additional library services.


The library's primary mission is to research inquiries made by members of Congress, which is carried out through the Congressional Research Service. It also houses and oversees the United States Copyright Office. The library is open to the public for research, although only high-ranking government officials and library employees may borrow (i.e., temporarily take custody of) books and materials.[8]

created in 1990, which became the National Digital Library in 1994. It provides free access online to digitized American history and culture resources, including primary sources, with curatorial explanations to support use in K-12 education.[41]

American Memory

website launched in 1994 to provide free public access to U.S. federal legislative information with ongoing updates; and Congress.gov website to provide a state-of-the-art framework for both Congress and the public in 2012;[42]

Thomas.gov

, founded in 2001 with First Lady Laura Bush,[43] has attracted more than 1,000 authors and a million guests to the National Mall and the Washington Convention Center to celebrate reading. With a major gift from David Rubenstein in 2013, the library established the Library of Congress Literacy Awards to recognize and support achievements in improving literacy in the U.S. and abroad;[44]

National Book Festival

, started with a grant of $60 million from John W. Kluge in 2000, brings international scholars and researchers to use library resources and to interact with policymakers and the public. It hosts public lectures and scholarly events, provides endowed Kluge fellowships, and awards the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity (now worth $1.5 million), the first Nobel-level international prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences (subjects not included in the Nobel awards);[45]

Kluge Center

, established in 2000; by 2015 this program administered 23,000 professional exchanges for emerging post-Soviet leaders in Russia, Ukraine, and other successor states of the former USSR. Open World began as a Library of Congress project, and later was established as an independent agency in the legislative branch.[46]

Open World Leadership Center

, congressionally mandated in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans from World War I to the present day;[47]

Veterans History Project

opened in 2007 at a 45-acre site in Culpeper, Virginia, established with a gift of more than $150 million by the Packard Humanities Institute, and $82.1 million in additional support from Congress.

National Audio-Visual Conservation Center

Access[edit]

The library is open for academic research to anyone with a Reader Identification Card. One may not remove library items from the reading rooms or the library buildings. Most of the library's general collection of books and journals are in the closed stacks of the Jefferson and Adams Buildings; specialized collections of books and other materials are in closed stacks in all three main library buildings, or are stored off-site. Access to the closed stacks is not permitted under any circumstances, except to authorized library staff, and occasionally, to dignitaries. Only the reading room reference collections are on open shelves.[94]


Since 1902, American libraries have been able to request books and other items through interlibrary loan from the Library of Congress if these items are not readily available elsewhere. Through this system, the Library of Congress has served as a "library of last resort", according to former Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam.[37] The Library of Congress lends books to other libraries with the stipulation that they be used only inside the borrowing library.[95] In 2017, the Library of Congress began development on a reader's card for children under the age of sixteen.[96]

Standards[edit]

In addition to its library services, the Library of Congress is actively involved in various standard activities in areas related to bibliographical and search and retrieval standards. Areas of work include MARC standards, Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Z39.50 and Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW), and Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU).[97] The Law Library of Congress "seeks to further legal scholarship by providing opportunities for scholars and practitioners to conduct significant legal research. Individuals are invited to apply for projects which would further the multi-faceted mission of the law library in serving the U.S. Congress, other governmental agencies, and the public."[98]

Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress

for Popular Song

Gershwin Prize

Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

Celebration

Founder's Day

National Book Festival

Mostly Lost Film Identification Workshop

: Developed the MARC format (Machine Readable Cataloging), the international data standard for bibliographic and holdings information in libraries.

Henriette Avram

: founder of the Center for the Book and first historian of the Library of Congress.

John Y. Cole

: American scholar of Southeast Asian history, head of the Southern Asia Section of the Orientalia (now Asian) Division of the Library of Congress, and a major contributor to scholarship on Asia and the development of South East Asian coverage in American library collections.[99]

Cecil Hobbs

head of the Congressional Research Service, president of the American Library Association (2020–2021), president of the Freedom to Read Foundation (2013–2016).

Julius C. Jefferson Jr.

Cole, John Y. and Henry Hope Reed. The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building (1998)

excerpt and text search

Small, Herbert, and Henry Hope Reed. The Library of Congress: Its Architecture and Decoration (1983)

Aikin, Jane (2010). "Histories of the Library of Congress". Libraries & the Cultural Record. 45 (1): 5–24. :10.1353/lac.0.0113. S2CID 161865550.

doi

Anderson, Gillian B. (1989), "Putting the Experience of the World at the Nation's Command: Music at the Library of Congress, 1800–1917", Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1): 108–49, :10.2307/831419, JSTOR 831419

doi

Bisbort, Alan, and Linda Barrett Osborne. The Nation's Library: The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. (Library of Congress, 2000)

Cole, John Young. Jefferson's legacy: a brief history of the Library of Congress (Library of Congress, 1993)

Cole, John Young. "The library of congress becomes a world library, 1815–2005." Libraries & culture (2005) 40#3: 385–398.

in Project MUSE

Cope, R. L. "Management Review of the Library of Congress: The 1996 Booz Allen & Hamilton Report," Australian Academic & Research Libraries (1997) 28#1

online

Mearns, David Chambers. The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress, 1800–1946 (1947), detailed narrative

Ostrowski, Carl. Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Library of Congress, 1783–1861 (2004)

Rosenberg, Jane Aiken. The Nation's Great Library: Herbert Putnam and the Library of Congress, 1899–1939 (University of Illinois Press, 1993)

Shevlin, Eleanor F.; Lindquist, Eric N. (2010). "The Center for the Book and the History of the Book". Libraries & the Cultural Record. 45 (1): 56–69. :10.1353/lac.0.0112. S2CID 161311744.

doi

Tabb, Winston; et al. (2003). "Library of Congress". Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. 3: 1593–1612.

The Library of Congress website

on YouTube

Library of Congress channel

Search the Library of Congress catalog

legislative information

Congress.gov

from The Federal Register RSS Feed

Library Of Congress Meeting Notices and Rule Changes

on Flickr

Library of Congress photos

at Project Gutenberg

Works by Library of Congress

at Internet Archive

Works by or about Library of Congress

at FamilySearch Research Wiki for genealogists

Library of Congress

. Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.

"Congress, Library of" 

Archived April 12, 2021, at the Wayback Machine

C-SPAN's Library of Congress documentary and resources

The Library of Congress National Library Service (NLS)

Video: "Library of Congress in 1968 – Computer Automation"

Library of Congress Web Archives – search by URL