This being Library Week, I thought it might be interesting to visit the world’s largest library: the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. All people can have “access to the creative record of the United States—and extensive materials from around the world—both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.”
It contains “more than 162 million items in nearly every language and format—from ancient Chinese woodblock prints to digital files. Today, the Library preserves treasures such as the Gutenberg Bible, Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation in Abraham Lincoln’s hand. The collections also include the full papers of 23 presidents and the works of eminent Americans such as Hannah Arendt, Alexander Graham Bell, Leonard Bernstein, Frederick Douglass, Martha Graham, Bob Hope, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Booker T. Washington. Other treasures include the first printed book in the Western world, baseball cards, comic books and cookbooks, millions of maps and atlases, photographs, posters, microfilms, movies, rare books, music manuscripts and recordings, and radio and television broadcasts.”
“It was created April 24, 1800, when President John Adams signed the bill that moved the seat of government from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., allocating $5,000 for ‘the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.’ ”
“The first library had 3,000 volumes, and they were held in the Capitol, which was lost when British troops invaded Washington in August 1814 and set fire to the building. Within a month, former President Thomas Jefferson, who was living in retirement at Monticello, offered his personal library, 6,487 books on myriad subjects in many languages as a replacement.”
“Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his extensive personal library as a replacement. Congress accepted his offer in January 1815, appropriating $23,950 to purchase his 6,487 books. Some members of the House of Representatives, including New Hampshire representative Daniel Webster, opposed the outright purchase. He wanted to return “all books of an atheistical, irreligious, and immoral tendency.”
“Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating a wide variety of books in several languages and on subjects such as philosophy, history, law, religion, architecture, travel, natural sciences, mathematics, studies of classical Greece and Rome, modern inventions, hot air balloons, music, submarines, fossils, agriculture, and meteorology. He had also collected books on topics not generally considered part of a legislative library, such as cookbooks. But, he believed all subjects had a place in the Library of Congress. He remarked: ‘I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.’”
The collection of more than 162 million items includes:
• more than 38.6 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages;
• more than 70 million manuscripts;
• the largest rare book collection in North America;
• the world’s largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music, and sound recordings.”
Congress, the general public, and other federal agencies use it. They make more than 1 million reference requests in a year. Americans who are blind or physically handicapped received nearly 22 million copies of Braille and recorded books and magazines to more than 862,000 reader accounts.
Researchers in the Library’s reading rooms—anyone over 16 can use these after obtaining an easy-to-get reader card—accessed nearly 900,000 items in the most recent fiscal year.
I always knew the library was used for research, but it is also full of literature. “The Library is the home of the U.S. Poet Laureate, the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, the Prize for American Fiction, and the Library of Congress Literacy Awards.”
If you need help, you can always use the Ask-A-Librarian service at loc.gov/rr/askalib/.
It’s so large that it has more than 3,000 employees. Over the years, it has definitely grown, and it has been involved in numerous political infighting.
There are three buildings that house the items at the Library of Congress. There isn’t any way to see the library when you travel to Washington, DC., but you must at least attempt to visit one of the buildings.
