Thomas Jefferson believed "there is ... no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer," and his broad approach to book collecting shaped the holdings of the Library of Congress. The library was created for members of Congress as a resource for their work—by extension becoming the nation's library and the world's largest repository of knowledge. In addition to politics, history, and law, its holdings encompass philosophy, poetry, classical literature, art, the natural sciences, and popular fiction.