Year 2003 at a Glance

• Welcomed more than 1 million on-site visitors.
• Provided reference services to 715,479 individuals (in-person, by telephone, and through written and electronic correspondence).
• Total of 127,720,880 items in the collections, including:
  • 19,367,655 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
  • 9,741,826 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports, and other printed material
  • 98,611,399 items in the nonclassified (special) collections. These included:
    • 2,715,554 audio materials, such as discs, tapes, talking books, and other recorded formats
    • 57,033,6262 total manuscripts
    • 4,793,399 maps
    • 13,733,491 microforms
    • 5,107,852 music
    • 13,854,544 visual materials
      this total included:
      • 924,804 moving images
      • 12,323,992 photographs
      • 88,045 posters
      • 522,703 prints and drawings
• Registered 534,122 claims to copyright.
• Completed 875,197 research assignments for the Congress through the Congressional Research Service.
• Circulated nearly 23 million disc, cassette, and braille items to a readership of more than 500,000 blind and physically handicapped patrons.
• Recorded more than 2.6 billion transactions on all of the Library’s public computer systems, including more than 184 million “hits” on America’s Library, the Library’s interactive Web site for children and families. A monthly average of 10 million transactions were recorded on the public legislative information system known as THOMAS and 47 million transactions each month on the American Memory Web site. At year’s end, the Library’s American Memory online historical collections contained 8.5 million digital files.
• Employed a permanent staff of 4,151 employees.
• Operated with a total fiscal 2003 appropriation of $539,496,502, including authority to spend $36.3 million in receipts and $7.4 million in emergency supplemental funding for security-related activities.