Library of Congress

Library of Congress, national library of the United States, Washington, D.C., est. 1800. Thomas Jefferson while Vice President was a prime mover in the creation of the library, and he supported it strongly during his presidency. In 1814, when much of the collection was destroyed by fire, Jefferson offered his own fine library to the Congress. This formed the basis of the collection until 1851, when fire destroyed some 35,000 volumes. The growth of the library progressed slowly thereafter until the passage of the Copyright Act of 1870, which required the deposit in the library of all copyright material. The acquisition in 1866 of the Smithsonian Institution's collection of 44,000 volumes and the purchase of the Peter Force collection of Americana (60,000 volumes; 1867) and the Joseph M. Toner American and Medical Library (24,000 volumes; 1892) made it one of the world's great libraries.

Intended primarily to serve the legislative branch of the government, it is now open to the public as a reference library and sends out many books through an interlibrary loan system. It has African and Middle Eastern, Asian, European, and Hispanic divisions; a law library; and excellent collections of manuscripts, serials, incunabula, geography and maps, rare books, prints and photographs, motion pictures, music and recordings, science and technology, and computer files, representing materials in more than 450 languages. As of 1999, the Library of Congress contained some 115 million items, including about 17 million books, 4 million maps, and 50 million manuscripts. Its Online Catalog provides a database of some 12 million items from its collections. The library sells duplicate catalog entries on magnetic tape to smaller libraries for the books it adds to its collections. It provides other vital services to libraries through its many bibliographic functions (among them maintaining the National Union Catalog of the holdings of 700 large libraries in the United States and running the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped) and its Copyright Office. The library's Poetry and Literature Center (est. 1936) is the home of the U.S. poet laureate. Mainly supported by congressional appropriations, the library also has income from gifts by foundations and individuals, administered by the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board.

Bibliography

See studies by P. M. Angle (1958), G. Gurney (1966), M. McCloskey (1968), and C. A. Goodrum (1974, rev. ed. 1982).

---

Library of Congress

U.S. library, the largest and one of the greatest of what may be considered national libraries. Founded in Washington, D.C., in 1800, it was housed in the Capitol until the building was burned by British troops in 1814; it moved to permanent quarters in 1897. In addition to serving as a reference source for members of Congress and other government officers, it is outstanding among the learned institutions of the world, with magnificent collections of books, manuscripts, music, prints, and maps. It contains some 18 million books, 2.5 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.5 million maps, and more than 54 million manuscripts.

---

Library of Congress 

the national library of the USA, located in Washington, D.C.; one of the largest libraries in the world. It was founded in 1800 by the Congress of the USA. It serves primarily governmental organs, research institutions, scholars, private firms, and industrial companies.

According to 1968 data, the holdings of the Library of Congress amounted to 14.5 million books and brochures, 132,000 volumes of bound newspapers, more than 29 million items of manuscript materials, 3.3 million items of musical scores, more than 3 million maps, and many other materials, including motion-picture films, phonograph records, and microfilms. The annual increase in holdings of the Library of Congress ranges from 1 to 3 million items. In content the collections are almost universal (except for foreign medical and agricultural literature, which is collected by the national medical and agricultural libraries). Most fully represented is literature on law, history, philology, politics, natural sciences, and technology, as well as reference and bibliographical publications. The Library of Congress possesses more than 5,500 incunabula, the libraries of T. Jefferson and a number of other presidents of the USA, collections of works of Chinese literature (330,000 volumes) and Japanese literature (450,000 volumes), and collections of rare American editions (60,000 volumes). In 1907 the Library of Congress acquired the library of the Krasnoiarsk merchant and bibliophile G. V. Iudin, which consists of 41,000 books and journals, mostly on Russian history. (At the present time the Library of Congress has approximately 300,000 publications in the Russian language.)

The Library of Congress has 18 reading rooms with 1,460 seats for readers. Of the bibliographical publications of the Library of Congress, the most important are The National Union Catalog, which has been published monthly since 1958, and a union catalog of books in the libraries of the USA (610 volumes).

REFERENCE

Mearns, D. C. The Story Up to Now: The Library of Congress,1800–1946. Washington, 1947.

B. P. KANEVSKII