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).
B. P. KANEVSKII