Origins

The Library was founded in 1800, making it the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation. On August 24, 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building (where the Library was housed) and destroyed the Library's core collection of 3,000 volumes. On January 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950.

Statistics

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world with more than 170 million items. View detailed collection statistics.

The Collections

Each working day the Library receives some 15,000 items and adds more than 10,000 items to its collections. Materials are acquired as Copyright deposits and 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.

International Collections

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. The Library is also collaborating with institutions around the globe to provide content on the World Digital Library.

Foreign Languages

Approximately half of the Library’s book and serial collections are in languages other than English. The collections contain materials in some 470 languages.

African and Middle Eastern Materials

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

Asian Materials

The Library's Asian Division collection holds more than 3 million items, the largest assemblage of Chinese, Japanese and Korean materials outside of Asia, and one of the largest Tibetan collections in the world.

European, Iberian, Latin American and Caribbean Materials

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.

Law Library

The Law Library of Congress is the world's largest law library, with more than 2.9 million volumes, 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.

Rare Books and Manuscripts

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 book printed in what is now the United States, “The Bay Psalm Book” (1640).

Children's Books

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).

Smallest Book

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.

Largest Book

The largest book in the Library of Congress is a 5-by-7 foot book featuring color images of Bhutan. With support from Microsoft, a team of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recorded the ancient life and culture in this South Asian country and made 40,000 digital images available to the Bhutan National Archives. A copy of the picture book was donated to the Library of Congress.

Oldest Example of Printing

One of the oldest examples 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.

Presidential Papers

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

Gutenberg Bible

The Gutenberg Bible, one of the treasures of the Library of Congress, was purchased in 1930. The 15th-century work is one of three perfect copies on vellum in the world.

Audio-Visual and Performing Arts Collections

Prints and Photographs

The Library's Prints and Photographs Division contains more than 17 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. More than 1.2 million images are accessible on the Prints and Photographs online catalog at www.loc.gov/pictures/.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound

Opened in 2007, the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va., was designed for the acquisition, cataloging, storage and preservation of the nation’s collection of moving images and recorded sounds. In partnership with the Packard Humanities Institute, the U.S. Congress and the Architect of the Capitol, the Library’s state-of-the-art facility houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of American and foreign-produced films, television broadcasts and sound recordings. The facility houses 6 million items, including more than 3.6 million sound recordings and more than 1.8 million film, television and video items, representing more than a century of audiovisual production.

Music

The Library holds the most comprehensive collection of American music in the world, more than 22 million items including 8.1 million pieces of sheet music. 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.

American Folklife Center and Veterans History Project

With more than 6 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 American Folklife Center administers the Veterans History Project, which was established by Congress in 2000 to preserve the reminiscences of the nation’s war veterans. To date, more than 100,000 submissions have been collected, including many from members of Congress.

The American Folklife Center also administers and preserves the StoryCorps project, a nationwide grassroots initiative to record the oral histories of ordinary citizens.

Other Fascinating Facts

Digital Talking Books

Since 1931, the Library has provided books to the blind in braille and on sound recordings. The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped has replaced its inventory of recordings on audio cassettes with newly developed Digital Talking Books and digital playback equipment.

Cartography

The Library's Geography and Map Division holds more than 5.6 million items, the world's largest collection of cartographic materials. 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 collection also includes the 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemüller, known as "America’s Birth Certificate," the first document on which the name "America" appears.

Telephone Directories

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. The Library acquires more than 8,000 volumes a year and holds more than 124,000 telephone books and microfilmed city directories from 650 U.S. cities and towns. This vast collection includes historical foreign telephone books and city directories (almost 1,500 per year received from more than 100 countries).

Comic Books and Newspapers

The Library’s Serial and Government Publications Division contains the world's largest collection of comic books (more than 140,000 items representing more than 12,000 titles). 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.

Scientific and Technical Information

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 5 million foreign and domestic items).