The Library was founded in 1800, making it the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation. On August 24, 1814, the Library's core collection of 3,000 volumes was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol, where the Library was housed.

On January 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. On Christmas Eve 1851, another fire destroyed two-thirds of the collection. Many of the volumes have since been replaced, but nearly 900 are missing. As part of the Library's Bicentennial celebration in 2000, Jefferson's library -- the foundation of the Library of Congress -- was reconstructed and placed on view to the public.

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with nearly 128 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, 5 million music items and 57 million manuscripts.

The Library receives some 22,000 items each working day and adds approximately 10,000 items to the collections daily. The majority of the collections are received through the Copyright registration process, as the Library is home to the U.S. Copyright Office. Materials are also acquired through gift, purchase, other government agencies (state, local and federal), Cataloging in Publication (a pre-publication arrangement with publishers) and exchange with libraries in the United States and abroad. Items not selected for the collections or other internal purposes are used in the Library's national and international exchange programs. Through these exchanges the Library acquires material that would not be available otherwise. The remaining items are made available to other federal agencies and are then available for donation to educational institutions, public bodies and nonprofit tax-exempt organizations in the United States.

Since 1962, the Library of Congress has maintained offices abroad to acquire, catalog and preserve library and research materials from countries where such materials are essentially unavailable through conventional acquisitions methods. Overseas offices in New Delhi (India), Cairo (Egypt), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Jakarta (Indonesia), Nairobi (Kenya), and Islamabad (Pakistan) collectively acquire materials from more than 60 countries, and acquire materials on behalf of United States libraries participating in the Cooperative Acquisitions Program.

Approximately half of the Library's book and serial collections are in languages other than English. Some 460 languages are represented in the collections.

The Law Library of Congress is the world's largest law library, with some 2.4 million items, including one of the world's best rare law book collections and the most complete collection of foreign legal gazettes in the United States. The Law Library contains United States congressional publications dating back to the nation's founding.

The Library's African and Middle Eastern Division holds some 600,000 volumes in the non-Roman script languages of the region.

The Library's Asian Division collection of some 2 million items represents the largest assemblage of Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials outside of Asia, and one of the largest Tibetan collections in the world.

The Library holds the largest collection of Russian-language materials in the United States and the largest outside of Russia (more than 750,000 items).

The Library's Iberian, Latin American and Caribbean collections, comprising more than 10 million items (books, journals, newspapers, maps, manuscripts, photographs, posters, recordings, sheet music and other materials) are the largest and most complete in the world.

The Library holds the largest rare book collection in North America (more than 700,000 volumes), including the largest collection of 15th century books in the Western Hemisphere. The collection also includes the first extant book printed in North America -- The Bay Psalm Book.

The Library possesses approximately 100 extremely rare children's books, including The Children's New Play-Thing (Philadelphia, 1763) and The Children's Bible (Philadelphia, 1763).

The smallest book in the Library of Congress is Old King Cole. It is 1/25" x 1/25", or about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The pages can only be turned with the use of a needle.

The largest book in the Library of Congress is John James Audubon's Birds of America, containing many life-size illustrations of birds. The book is 39.37" (1 meter) high.

The oldest example of printing in the world -- passages from a Buddhist sutra, or discourse, printed in 770 A.D. -- is housed in the Library's Asian Division. The oldest written material in the Library is a cuneiform tablet dating from 2040 B.C.

Foremost among the Manuscript Division's holdings are the papers of 23 presidents, ranging from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.

The Gutenberg Bible, one of the treasures of the Library of Congress, was purchased in 1930. It is one of three perfect copies on vellum in the world.

The Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress contains some 13.9 million visual images, including the most comprehensive international collection of posters in the world, the most comprehensive visual record of the Civil War and pioneering documentation of America's historic architecture.

The largest and most comprehensive collection of American and foreign-produced films and television broadcasts in the world is housed in the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. The Library has been collecting films and documentation relating to the production of motion pictures since the 1890s, including "The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze," the oldest extant copyrighted motion picture (copyrighted in 1893 by Thomas Edison).

The Library holds the most comprehensive collection of American music in the world, more than 5 million items. The collection includes an extensive assemblage of original manuscripts by composers of the American musical theater and the largest collection of any one kind of musical instrument (flute) in the world. The Library sponsors a long-running broadcast concert series of chamber music.

The Library of Congress holds the nation's largest public collection of sound recordings (music and spoken word) and radio broadcasts, with some 2.7 million recordings. Recordings represent more than 100 years of sound recording history in nearly every sound recording format and cover a wide range of subjects and genres in considerable depth and breadth.

With more than 1.5 million items, the Archive of Folk Culture in the American Folklife Center is the largest repository of traditional cultural documentation in the United States and one of the largest in the world. It contains the largest collection of American Indian music and spoken word, including the earliest ethnographic field recordings made anywhere in the world.

The Library's Geography and Map Division holds the world's largest collection of cartographic materials, 4.8 million items. It has the largest collection of fire insurance maps of cities and towns in the United States, providing unparalleled coverage of the growth of urban America from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

The Library's general collections contain the largest historical collection of U.S. telephone criss-cross (phone number and address) and city directories in the world, acquiring more than 8,000 volumes a year. The Library holds more than 124,000 telephone books and microfilmed city directories from 650 U.S. cities and towns, and a vast collection of historical foreign telephone books and city directories (almost 1,500 per year received from more than 100 countries).

The Library has the largest and most comprehensive collection of U.S. Ph.D. dissertations in the nation, numbering about 1 million titles on paper, microfilm and microfiche.

The Library's Serial and Government Publications Division contains the world's largest collection of comic books (5,000 titles; 100,000 issues). The oldest comic book in the collection is Popular Comics, February 1936. The division also holds the world's most extensive newspaper collection. The oldest original newspaper in the collection is Mercurius Publicas Comprising the Sum of Forraign Intelligence, December 29, 1659.

The Library of Congress has one of the largest and most diverse collections of scientific and technical information in the world. Such material makes up roughly one-fourth of its total book and journal collection. The Library's Science, Technology and Business Division maintains this country's largest collections of technical reports and standards (some 4.4 million foreign and domestic items).

Rev. January 5, 2004