Library of Congress.

Library of Congress. I INTRODUCTION Library of Congress, largest and most comprehensive library in the world, located in Washington, D.C. The Library of Congress functions as the national library of the United States, although it has never been officially recognized as such through legislation. The library's primary purpose is to serve as the research library of the Congress of the United States, but its collections, services, and reading rooms are freely available for use by all persons over high school age. The Library of Congress also serves as the official copyright agency of the United States. Established by an act of Congress in 1800, the library was first located in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Today the Library of Congress occupies three large buildings in the Capitol Hill area of the city, near the Capitol building and the United States Supreme Court building. Approximately 1 million people visit the library each year. The Library of Congress also works closely with specialized libraries in the executive branch of government that have been designated by Congress as national libraries. These include the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Education. II COLLECTIONS The collections of the Library of Congress contain more than 130 million items, including about 58 million manuscripts, more than 17 million books, about 12 million photographs, nearly 5 million maps, and nearly 3 million sound recordings. These collections have an enormous scope, consisting of research materials on most subjects and in more than 450 languages. The library's collections are especially strong in American history, politics, and literature; music; geography; law (especially foreign law); economics; genealogy; U.S. public documents; the history of science; libraries and librarianship; and bibliography in all subjects. The materials have a wide range of formats, including written manuscripts, maps, musical recordings, microforms, motion pictures, photographs, posters, prints and drawings, radio and television broadcasts, talking books (audio recordings of books, designed for use by the visually impaired), newspapers, technical reports, videotapes and videodiscs, CD-ROMs, and computer programs. The library's collections of books, maps, atlases, newspapers, music, motion pictures, photographs, and microforms are the largest in the world. Especially notable among the library's collections are its copyright deposits, personal papers, and foreign language collections. A Copyright Depository Through a provision in U.S. copyright law, the Library of Congress is entitled to receive copies of every work registered for copyright in the United States. Copyright deposits make up the core of the general collections. The library's role as the U.S. copyright depository has contributed to the popular belief that it contains one copy of every book published in the United States. It does not. The library is not required to retain all U.S. copyright deposits indefinitely. Through a program in its Exchange and Gift Division, the library shares with other institutions items that are declared surplus to its needs. B Personal Papers The library's manuscript holdings include the personal papers (letters, diaries, and other documents) of 23 American presidents ranging in time from George Washington (1732-1799) through Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933). (The personal papers of many presidents after Coolidge are contained in the presidential libraries of the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C.) The Library of Congress manuscript collections also contain the personal papers of other eminent Americans, such as poet Walt Whitman, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, social reformer Susan B. Anthony, humanitarian Clara Barton, abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass, and composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. C Foreign Languages Many of the library's foreign languages collections are exceptional. Its foreign newspapers and gazettes are particularly strong. About half of the library's collections of books and serial publications (newspapers, periodicals, and government documents) are in languages other than English, and more than 450 languages are represented. The library's Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Polish collections are the largest outside of those countries, and the Arabic collections are the largest outside of Egypt. The collection of Hispanic and Portuguese materials is among the largest in the world. III BUILDINGS The Library of Congress's most monumental and ornate structure is the Thomas Jefferson Building, named for Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. The building was constructed beginning in 1886 specifically to serve as the American national library. It opened its doors to the public in 1897. Designed in an Italian Renaissance style, it is one of the most elaborately decorated buildings in the United States. The John Adams Building was completed in 1938 to provide additional space for the library's growing collections. It is named for John Adams, the second president of the United States. More functional than overly decorative, the building was designed to house 10 million books. The James Madison Building is by far the largest of the library's three structures. Opened in 1980, it is also the nation's official memorial to James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. In addition to these three buildings in Washington, D.C., the library maintains motion picture storage and preservation facilities in Dayton, Ohio. The Library of Congress also operates acquisitions offices overseas in Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Pakistan. In 1984 Congress appropriated $81.5 million for the renovation and restoration of the Jefferson Building and the Adams Building. Work was completed in 1997, in time for the celebration of the Jefferson Building's centennial. Both buildings were modernized and restored to their original beauty. IV ACCESS The Library of Congress and its 21 reading rooms are open to people above high school age without charge or special permission. Children as well as adults may visit the library on escorted tours. Members of the public must use the library's research materials on the premises. However, the library extends the use of its books and other research materials to researchers working in libraries around the country through its interlibrary loan program. Computer workstations in or near each library reading room enable patrons to use an automated bibliographic search program to look up titles in the library's general book collections. The library provides reference help in all of its reading rooms. Users outside the library can access millions of bibliographic records, including the entire card catalog, through the Internet. In addition, the library's National Digital Library program provides access through the Internet to nearly 2 million digital files from the library's collections of maps, photographs, musical compositions, manuscripts, books, and films. The Digital Library's eventual goal is to make available 80 million items from the Library of Congress's collection that are not easily available elsewhere. V ORGANIZATION AND FUNDING The librarian of Congress serves as the director of the institution. Tradition, politics, and strong personalities have shaped the function of this office. Although the Library of Congress was established in 1800, the office of librarian was not created until passage of a law in 1802. This law stipulated that the librarian of Congress was to be appointed by the president, not by the Congress. Congress had no formal role in the appointment process until 1897, when the Senate gained the privilege of confirming the president's selection. No special qualifications are prescribed by law for the job of librarian of Congress, nor is a term of office specified. The office of librarian of Congress carried little formal authority until 1897, when the same law that gave the Senate the power to approve a president's nomination also gave the librarian sole responsibility for making the institution's rules and regulations and for appointing its staff. The 1802 law also established a Joint Congressional Committee on the Library of Congress. Drawn from the members of the library's oversight committees in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate, the committee provides the librarian of Congress with guidance and advice on a wide range of governance issues. The staff of the Library of Congress is organized to respond to the needs of its various constituencies. The library must serve the Congress and the federal government, the copyright community, librarians and information specialists, educators, researchers, scholars, and the general public. Finding the proper balance among the library's various roles is a challenge for each librarian of Congress. The library consists of several administrative units, each of which serves a particular constituency. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the research and reference arm of the U.S. Congress and its committees. The Copyright Office administers the operation of the U.S. copyright law, a major force for encouraging literary and artistic endeavors. The Law Library serves Congress (mostly in the area of international law) as well as the public. The largest of the library's administrative units, Library Services, provides acquisitions, cataloging, bibliographic, preservation, research, reference, and support services. This department serves the library itself and other libraries, as well as scholars, researchers, and the general public. Primarily the federal government funds the library. Through the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, many specific activities are supported by gifts and trust funds. In 1990 the library established its first development office to raise additional funds. The James Madison Council, a national private-sector support group, also helps fund special projects and activities. VI ACQUISITIONS The library acquires materials in a number of ways. Acquisitions are made through exchange with libraries in the United States and abroad; gifts; transfer from local, state, and federal agencies and from foreign governments; purchase; and copyright deposits. The library acquires most of its materials through copyright deposits, particularly in the map, music, motion picture, and prints and photographs divisions. More than 7,000 items are added to the library's collections every working day. VII CATALOGING AND CLASSIFICATION Early in the 20th century the Library of Congress developed its own classification system for organizing and cataloging library materials. The Library of Congress Classification system is now used by many academic, research, and specialized libraries throughout the United States and abroad. The classification system is continually being developed, revised, and expanded. The cataloging information has changed in forms ranging from books and printed catalog cards to machine-readable tapes to online services. The Library of Congress also maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system, which is used by many public and school libraries. VIII PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION The library's Conservation Laboratory is one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world. It uses a full range of traditional methods of conservation and binding as well as newer technologies to preserve its collections. These measures include maintaining materials in the proper environment, preparing for emergencies such as fires, ensuring the proper care and handling of the collections, and stabilizing fragile and rare materials by placing them in acid-free containers to protect them from deterioration. Because of the scope and variety of the work carried out in its facilities, the library established a National Preservation Program Office in 1984 to share the results of its research and to promote preservation activity in the United States and abroad. IX RESEARCH The library's Congressional Research Service (CRS) provides Congress with information on a wide variety of topics. The department answers more than 500,000 requests a year, ranging from simple requests for data to complex in-depth studies. CRS also prepares digests and summaries of major legislation and other reference tools to help members of Congress and their committees stay abreast of the daily flow of information. The library makes much of this material available to both Congress and the general public on THOMAS, an online resource for information about current legislation. X SPECIAL PROGRAMS The Library of Congress maintains a variety of special programs that perform specific functions or serve particular constituencies. Each of these programs has a unique organizational structure and funding mechanism. A National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped operates a system in collaboration with 160 cooperating libraries that serve blind and physically handicapped individuals of all ages. At no cost to readers, it supplies books and magazines in Braille, disks or cassettes, and playback equipment. B Poetry and Literature Center The library's Poetry and Literature Center administers a series of readings by authors that began in the 1940s and is among the oldest of such programs in the United States. The center is also the home of the library's consultant in poetry, a position that has existed since 1936. Since then many of the nation's best-known poets have served one- or two-year terms as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. These poets include Robert Lowell (1947-1948), Elizabeth Bishop (1949-1950), Robert Frost (1958-1959), James Dickey (1966-1968), and Gwendolyn Brooks (1985-1986). The office of consultant in poetry was changed to poet laureate consultant in poetry in 1985, and Robert Penn Warren (1986-1987) first held this post. C American Folklife Center The library established the American Folklife Center in 1976 to preserve American folklife and to present it to the public. The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, which was created in 1928 to collect and preserve examples of American folk music. Now containing audio recordings, photographs, film, field notes, and other materials, this archive has become one of the most significant collections of cultural research materials in the world. The American Folklife Center's programs include field projects, workshops, concerts, archival preservation, and advisory assistance. D The Center for the Book The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress was created in 1977 to stimulate public interest in books, reading, and libraries, and to encourage the historical study of the role of books and print culture. Its national reading promotion network includes 34 affiliated state centers and more than 50 national educational and civic organizations. A public-private partnership, it depends on private sector involvement and funding for support of its projects, events, and publications. XI EXHIBITIONS Spacious and ornate exhibition halls for the library's collections were an important feature of the library's Jefferson Building when it opened in 1897. However, in subsequent years the exhibits program was hampered by the growth of the library's collections and the need for additional office space. The restoration and reopening of the Jefferson Building exhibit halls, b'eginning in 1993, enabled the library to once again feature treasures from its own collections as well as those of other major libraries. In 1997 the library inaugurated American Treasures of the Library of Congress, a long-term exhibition featuring important items from throughout the librarys collections. Key permanent exhibits in the Jefferson Building's Great Hall include the Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz. Other changing exhibitions are mounted in public areas and reading rooms in the three buildings. The library also sponsors a traveling exhibits program to present selected items from its collections in other cities. Major exhibitions at the Library of Congress are also featured on the Internet. XII PUBLICATIONS The Library of Congress has produced thousands of publications since its first annual report, issued in 1866. Early publications included the printing and distribution of card catalogs, bibliographic works, and historical texts from the library's collections. In 1943 the library introduced Quarterly Journal, a publication produced by the Government Printing Office. The library stopped publishing Quarterly Journal in 1983. In the 1960s the Library of Congress developed a method of communicating its catalog records to other institutions in formats that could be read and interpreted automatically by machines. Known as the MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) format, this system for converting, maintaining, and distributing bibliographic information soon became the standard method by which most libraries share data about books and other research materials. The efficiency of the MARC format stimulated the widespread automation of libraries and information networks across the nation and in other countries. In an effort to save on printing costs and to achieve greater distribution of its materials, in the late 1970s the library began to publish and distribute catalog information on microfiche and, later, on CD-ROM. The library also gradually started to copublish books with university presses and commercial publishers. In 1993 the library obtained congressional approval to make its bibliographic data available on the Internet. The following year, the library launched a bimonthly magazine for a general audience, Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress shares its collections with an increasingly wide audience through the National Digital Library (NDL) program and other electronic publishing programs. The NDL program, in cooperation with other major research institutions, transfers millions of the library's unique American history collections into digital formats. It then makes these materials freely available to teachers, students, and the general public over the Internet. Specialized collections in this project include political documents, films, written manuscripts, photographs, and sound recordings of American history. Among the materials are architectural drawings, photographs, and other documents of historic American buildings throughout the United States; scripts, costume designs, and production notebooks from the Federal Theatre Project during the 1930s; early motion pictures and sound recordings from the Thomas A. Edison Companies (see Thomas Alva Edison); panoramic maps presenting aerial views of cities and towns across the United States from 1847 to 1921; and photographs of the American Civil War taken by photographer Mathew Brady and his staff. XIII HISTORY The Library of Congress is the oldest cultural institution in the nation's capital. Through its diverse activities and its three massive structures on Capitol Hill, it has become a symbol of American democracy and of faith in the power of learning. Congress established the Library of Congress on April 24, 1800, as the government prepared to move from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to the new capital city of Washington. Almost from its founding, the institution was more than a library of the Congress alone, because an 1802 law made the appointment of the librarian of Congress a presidential responsibility. The law also permitted the president and vice president to borrow books, a privilege that eventually was extended to the judiciary, officials of government agencies, and, under certain circumstances, to members of the public. The library has been shaped primarily by the philosophy of its principal founder, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson believed that members of a democratic legislature needed information and ideas on all subjects in order to perform their roles as representatives of the public. As president of the United States from 1801 to 1809, Jefferson took a keen and continuing interest in the library. In 1814, the British invaded Washington and destroyed the Capitol, including the Library of Congress. By then retired to Monticello, his home, Jefferson offered to sell his personal library of more than 6000 volumes to Congress. At the time this was the largest and most comprehensive library in the country, covering a wide range of subjects in several languages. The purchase was approved in 1815, doubling the size of the library and greatly expanding the scope of its collections. Anticipating an argument that his collection might be too wide-ranging and comprehensive for use by a legislative body, Jefferson argued that there was 'no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.' Jefferson's support of access to universal knowledge has formed the rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today's Library of Congress. Similarly, his belief in the power of knowledge to strengthen democracy has shaped the library's philosophy of sharing its collections and services as widely as possible. The library greatly expanded its role as a national institution under the guidance of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who served as librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897. Spofford applied Jefferson's philosophy on a grand scale. He linked the library's legislative and national functions, building a comprehensive collection for the Congress as well as the public. In 1866 and 1867 his acquisitions established the base of the library's science and Americana collections and made it the largest library in the United States. In 1870 Spofford further enlarged the collections by centralizing all U.S. copyright activities at the library. This ensured the continuing growth of the collections by stipulating that two copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered for copyright be deposited in the library. In 1871 Spofford initiated a campaign to construct a separate building for the library. Under Spofford's guidance, the Thomas Jefferson Building was eventually completed in 1897. Spofford's successors have wholeheartedly accepted his concept of the Library of Congress as both a research library for the U.S. Congress and a national library for the American people. Herbert Putnam, librarian of Congress from 1899 to 1939, extended this philosophy still further. To Putnam, a national library should be more than a comprehensive collection housed in Washington, D.C. Instead, it should be 'a collection universal in scope which has a duty to the country as a whole.' The first experienced librarian to serve as librarian of Congress, Putnam felt that a national library should actively serve other libraries. Beginning in 1901 Putnam nationalized the library's collections by initiating the sale and distribution of printed catalog cards and union catalogs, and by creating the interlibrary loan system. During his tenure, the library helped systemize American scholarship and librarianship in general through the widespread sharing of its bibliographic apparatus. These and other innovations established the patterns of library service that exist today. Since Putnam's day, the Library of Congress has grown steadily while balancing its legislative, national, and international roles. Poet and educator Archibald MacLeish, who served as librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, stressed the importance of the library as a cultural institution and as a symbol of democracy. During World War II (1939-1945) MacLeish gained support for the library by publicly defending American culture against the threat of totalitarianism in Europe. Political scientist Luther H. Evans held the post of librarian of Congress from 1945 to 1953. Evans looked to a broader national role for the institution, but in the end pushed forward its bibliographic and international activities. While Evans held his post, the library significantly increased its collections of research materials from foreign countries. The library's foreign acquisitions program expanded still further under the leadership of L. Quincy Mumford, who served as librarian of Congress from 1954 to 1974. To accommodate the increased collections, Mumford initiated the planning for construction of the Madison Building, which eventually opened in 1980. A new public role for the Library of Congress emerged under the leadership of historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who served as librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. Under Boorstin's leadership the library's budget grew from $116 million in 1975 to more than $250 million in 1987. Emphasizing the library's role as a national cultural resource, he greatly increased the institution's visibility. Boorstin's successor, historian James H. Billington, has vigorously pursued a similar course since he became librarian in 1987. By establishing the National Digital Library, he has enlisted private-sector support in developing a new educational role for the library. The National Digital Library and similar projects also demonstrate Billington's commitment to use new technologies to share the library's collections with schools, libraries, and the entire nation. Contributed By: John Y. Cole Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.